MURAL PAINTING 
IN AMERICA 


EDWIN H. BLASHFIELD 


ae 


AMERICA 


; 


ice an ard ES SR OM ee OU 


Copyright by John La Farge 


Joun La Farce: “The Ascension.” Decoration of the chancel of the 
Church of the Ascension, New York City 


Example showing an almost equal balance of landscape and figures 


MURAL PAINTING IN 
AMERICA 


THE SCAMMON LECTURES 


DELIVERED BEFORE THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO, 
MARCH, 1912, AND SINCE GREATLY ENLARGED 


BY 
EDWIN HOWLAND BLASHFIELD 


WITH NUMEROUS REPRODUCTIONS OF 
REPRESENTATIVE WORKS 


NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 
1928 


FOREWORD 


Murat PaintTinc may safely be called the most 
exacting, as it certainly is the most complicated, 
form of painting in the whole range of art; its scope 
includes figure, landscape, and portrait; its practice 
demands the widest education, the most varied 
forms of knowledge, the most assured experience. 
Save by the initiated it is apt to be misapprehended, 
as a form of art at best demanding little but arrange- 
ment, fancy, lightness of hand, at worst as a com- 
mercial product calculable as to its worth by the 
hour and the square foot. It is the object of this 
book to try to make a fair statement of the real de- 
mands of Mural Painting, and to endeavor to sug- 
gest its real value. The book is based upon six 
lectures delivered in March, 1912, at the Art Insti- 
tute of Chicago, under the auspices of the Scammon 
Foundation, but since then, a nearly equal amount 
of entirely new matter has been added. 


CONTENTS. 


CHAPTER PAGE 
I. Tse ImporTance oF DECORATION .....e ee I 


- 


I. THE DECORATED BUILDING AS A TEACHER ATPase 3 
II, THE MAIN FACTORS IN OUR DECORATIVE TRADITION . 8 
III. THE FOCAL IMPORTANCE OF THE PUBLIC BUILDING . 15 
IV. OUR SLOWNESS TO REALIZE THE IMPORTANCE OF DEC- 

ieee Ws AIL eis ay ees. ee Sh eRe wa epee Bk 

V. NATIONAL ART AS A NATIONAL ASSET .... . 29 


(II. Harmony Between Burtpinc ComMISSIONER AND 


Peet ECe 62” eS eC Oe le Fae oe at 

I, THE DANGER OF A PERFUNCTORY ATTITUDE OF MIND . 43 

Il, SELECTION OF THE ARTIST EXECUTANTS ... . 59 
III, COMPETITION versus DIRECT APPOINTMENT. . . . 61 
TV. IMPORTANCE OF THE ARCHITECT . . 4 6 ss. e 72 


III. Importance oF ExperRreENCE IN THE Murat PaInTER . 77 


I, EXPERIENCE PLUS TALENT ESSENTIAL . . « « - 79 
II. DIFFICULTIES WHICH MAKE EXPERIENCE ESSENTIAL . 86 


IV. Harmony Between Buitpinc ComMIssIONER AND 
MA ERIN oe eh ng Saas 9 ara a ae eee 


I. THE ARTIST'S CONSTITUENCY IN THE PAST .. . 97 
II. THE NOVELTY OF THE SITUATION IN RELATION TO 
MURAL PAINTING IN AMERICA . . : ¢ s'6 » 99 


V. Mourtuauity Between Arcuitect AND Murat PAINTER 109 


Vil Murvatury or Murat Pawrrens . «0.0. 6 + se 123 


I, DISTRIBUTION OF THE DECORATIVE WORK ... . I25 
II. THE RELATION OF MUTUAL EFFORT TO THE MAXIMUM 
OF EXPRESSION ° ° ° . ° . se . ° e e o 133 


vii 


aoe 


Vill 
CHAPTER 


Vil. 


VIII. 


XI. 


XII. 


_XUI. 
XIV. 


CONTENTS 


Ill. THE PROBLEM OF TWO PAINTERS WORKING IN ONE 

ROOM eo a te) eH ec 
IV. THE QUESTION OF A DIVIDED RESPONSIBILITY a 
Vv. A POSSIBLE SOLUTION OF A DIFFICULT PROBLEM , 
VI. THE NEED OF SKILFUL ASSISTANTS . . » »« eo e 


SIGNIFICANCE IN Murat PaInTING . ...... 


I. SIGNIFICANCE IN THE ART OF THE PAST ... . 

II. INCLUSIVENESS OF DECORATIVE ART AS TO SIGNIFI- 
CANOE. (4) 00 (gc 's) amet Dy a ea 

III, AMERICANS HAVE NO EXCUSE FOR ESCHEWING SIGNIF- 
YCANCE (20g s we ke nie ee 


FUNDAMENTAL EpucaTion In ART . 2... ss 


Tue ImporTANCE OF CULTURE oe Oe a ee 


I. THE ATTITUDE OF THE PAST TOWARD CULTURE ,. . 
II, ECLECTICISM INEVITABLE TO US 4.4 . 2 « « e« « 


Have We as vet a STYLas?. yee 


EvoLuTion oF PRESENT PRACTICE ... + 6 « « 


I. THE INFLUENCE OF PUVIS DE CHAVANNES ae ee 
II, OUR RECENT TENDENCY TOWARD ULTRA-LIGHT COLOR- 
ATION . e e . . e . s = e ° > e e s 


INFLUENCE OF THE FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH CEN- 
OD PORIBS ee ca ce ie ee 


ci NO STYLE FINAL e . ° > . ° ° . e e s e 
II, THE LESSON OF DECADENT ART oe) eee ae) eae 


MopeErN TECHNIC AND PRESENT TENDENCY ... - 


Im Concnusion 4) |: a ceo soliw pe 


PAGE 


135 


173 
175 


259 


INTRODUCTION TO ILLUSTRATIONS 


Lack of space makes it impossible to give in this 
book a more complete representation of the work of 
American mural painters. Young as the school is, 
an adequate presentation would require many score, 
indeed even some hundreds, of illustrations. 

William Morris Hunt, whose paintings fell from 
imperfectly plastered walls, and John La Farge, 
whose wise work remains to us as a cause for lasting 
pride, were the pioneers, and were closely followed 
by Will H. Low, with his ceiling in the Waldorf. 
McKim’s great enterprise of the Boston Public Li- 
brary, with the presentation of the work of Puvis de 
Chavannes, John S. Sargent, and Edwin A. Abbey, 
was nearly contemporaneous with the building of 
the World’s Fair of Chicago, the first big general 
experiment in American decoration, when twenty 
mural painters at least tried their ’prentice hands. 
Only a few years later nearly the same group of 
men, but with many others added to their number, 
decorated the Library of Congress in Washington. 
American mural painting was now fairly launched 
both in the East and in the West. 


ix 


x INTRODUCTION TO ILLUSTRATIONS 


In the latter, where the Chicago Exhibition had 
given such an impulse, the movement became imme- 
diate and active in the decoration of the State capi- 
tols of Minnesota and Iowa and later of Wisconsin 
and South Dakota. Somewhat later still began the 
decoration of the Federal Building in Cleveland — 
and of many other important court-houses and post- 
offices (including the Carnegie Institute of Pitts- 
burgh) throughout the Middle West. In the East 
the decoration of the Library of Congress was soon 
followed by that of the Baltimore court-house, the 
Boston State House, the court-houses of Newark, 
Wilkes-Barre, Youngstown, Jersey City, the Uni- 
versity Club of New York, the College of the City 
of New York, and a whole succession of libraries, 
churches (notably the Church of the Paulist Fathers 
in New York), hotels, theatres, schools, and private 
dwellings. Very early among the important Eastern 
decorations must be accounted also the lunettes at 
Bowdoin College and the panels painted for Men- 
delssohn Hall, New York, by Robert Blum. 

‘Upon many of these buildings whole groups of 
artists were employed, and such experiments as the 
decoration of the State capitols of Minnesota, lowa, 
Wisconsin, the court-house of Baltimore, the Federal 
Building in Cleveland, have taught lessons to the 
painters and public alike, affording to the former a 
practice indispensable to success, and helping the 
latter to an appreciation of the gradual growth of 


INTRODUCTION TO ILLUSTRATIONS xi 


mural art in America. This practice was invaluable 
not only to the men who had planned the decora- 
tion but to their assistants, who aided them in carry- 
ing it out and who thus became in their own turn 
planners and directors of important decorative en- 
terprises. 

There has been space in this book for representa- 
tion of only a few of our mural painters and men 
have been left out who are quite as good as many of 
of those included, for the list is long. Judging from 
the latter, American artists, many of them at least, 
have a natural inclination toward decoration, for 
one at once associates a highly developed decorative 
sense with the names of such painters as Vedder, Cox, 
Parrish, Miss Oakley, Barry Faulkner, Jules Guérin, 
and indeed many others. 

In the selection of reproductions for this book an 
attempt has been made to choose subjects which il- 
lustrated the decorative practice of the mural painter 
as influenced by varying conditions, these conditions 
being in some cases indicated or explained in foot- 
notes. It should be remembered that these little 
reproductions, each covering only a few inches of 
paper, represent in many cases wall-paintings fifty 
feet long. It is easy to realize that such inadequacy 
of proportion can be only explanatory and may not 
pretend to realistic presentation. 

No complete list of American mural paintings ex- 
ists; the best thus far is that published by Miss Flor- 


xii INTRODUCTION TO ILLUSTRATIONS 


ence N. Levy in her Art Annuals. It is to be hoped 
that before long a complete catalogue may be made 
containing not only the names of the artists of the 
subjects of the mural panels and of their where- 
abouts but also a memorandum of their dimensions. 

The author desires to give an explanation of the 
fact that the examples of conventional shapes of 
panels, also of experimental and other working 
drawings, are made up wholly from his own works. 
The development of the subject required a large 
number of examples, and their number in turn 
necessitated such a diminution of size, that the 
author did not feel at liberty to ask other artists 
to consent to such a miniature reproduction of 
their work. 


ILLUSTRATIONS 


Joun La Farce: “The Ascension.” Decoration of the 
Chancel of the Church of the Ascension, New York 


EE oy ea ew a ee ks . Frontispiece 
; FACING PAGE 
Epwin H. Brasurietp: Showing various shapes of panels 
common to the practice of a mural painter. . . . . 6 
Decoration for dome crown of Wisconsin State Capi- 
tol, in process, with unpainted spaces left for goring, 
and with duplicate figures reserved as alternatives 
uy epplication of canvas’ 2.7 14 
Placing the figures in a aaa 
my See ea ae e 22 
Trying scale with a paper model 
In Lantern Crown, Library of Congress 
; 28 
Trying scale of figures for Wisconsin dome 
Travelling scaffold used at the Library of Congress . 34 
Epwin A. Apsey: “Science Revealing the Treasures of 
the Earth.” Decorative lunette in the main rotunda 
of the State Capitol of Pennsylvania, Harrisburg . . 44 
Joun W. Atexanver: “The Crowning of Pittsburg.” The 
main panel in the Apotheosis of Pittsburg, Carnegie In- 
METRO MMAAT USDA ip: aio U's Wien wile o6 aaa Oe Se 48 
Huco Battin: Centre ceiling panel in a room of the State 
Rm VR HOIEORY WIS. ek ee oe we) we 8 54 
Rozsert Bium: Decoration in Mendelssohn Hall Glee 
Club, New York. Fragment......... PRON 


xiii 


XIV ILLUSTRATIONS 


Georce W. Breck: “Reflection.’’ One of the ceiling pan- 
els in the library of the residence of the late Whitelaw 
Reid. a6 8 a 


Kenyon Cox: “The Light of Learning.” Decoration in 
the Public Library, Winona, Minn. ....... = 


Artuur Crisp: “The Attributes of Dramatic Art.” 
Decoration for wall by stairway, Belasco Theatre . 


Extiotr DaincERFIELD: “The Epiphany.” Part of ; the 
decoration in the Church of St. Mary the ey 
New. York City. <¢ 4:08 eae pica Ceara 


T. W. Dewinc: “The Days.” Decoration in the home of 
Miss Cheney, South Manchester, Mass. . . .. . : 


Barry FauLKner: Fragment of decoration in the house of 
Mrs. E. H. Harriman’: <3 us uae Parr me 


A. E. Fortncer and Vincent ADERENTE: ‘“ Yonkers, 
Past and Present.” Panel from the series in the new 
Court-House 2 2.0) Sr Se Se eee ie a aay 


Eimer E. Garnsey: One of a series of “ Paintings of Sev- 
enteenth-Century Ports” in the Collector’s room of 
the United States Custom-House, New York City . . 


Jutes Guerin: Interior of the Pennsylvania Railroad Sta- 
tion, with men working at the decorative maps. . . 


Witiiam Laure Harris: Example of the laying out, in 
the Church of St. Paul the Apostle, New York, of a 
decoration which is being executed in color, gold, and 
POUT is SS See antes deg ake PAPE eR 


Ausert Herter: “Europe.” One of the decorations in 
the tapestry room of the St. Francis Hotel, San 
Francisco, Cal. 3°.) .5 0s 6! eeoecke Le Ce 


Witiram Morris Hunt: “The Flight of Night.” Painted 
for the State Capitol, Albany, N. Y......... 


68 


74 


82 


112 


= 


118 


126 


132 


140 


ILLUSTRATIONS 


XV 
FACING PAGE 
Francis C. Jones: Decoration in apartment of the artist 152 
Cuartes R. Lams: Dome in Memorial Chapel, Minne- 
apolis, Minn., executed in mosaic. ......... 158 
JoserH Lauper: “The Pilgrimage of Life.” Window in 
the First Congregational Church, Montclair, N. J... 166 
Witu H. Low: “The Garden of Diane.” Central panel 
decoration in reception hall of the residence of the 
late Anthony N. Brady, Albany, N.Y. ...... 170 
Frep Dana Marsu: “Engineering.” Mural painting for 
the library of the Engineering Societies, New York 
RE rt eS AL nate. ocpel ia teil A ae 176 
Greorce W. Maynarp: Ceiling, Library of Congress, 
pS UN SSE arin ta a Ar eee ra 182 
Francis Davis Mituet: “Paying for the Land, January 
30, 1658.” Decoration of rotunda, Hudson County 
eres iouee, jersey City 2 Pe ee ee 188 
H. Stppons Mowsray: Decoration in the University Club 
LR Re 17 a Og SOO Pa a amano ea ae 194 
VioteT Oaktey: “Penn’s Vision.” From a series of 
panels in the Governor’s room of the Pennsylvania 
POO MOaPIT TIAtTiSOUIe 6 ae ee ees 200 
MAXFIELD ParrisH: Decoration for the girls’ dining-room 
of the Curtis Publishing Company, Philadelphia 204 
Howarp Pye: “The Genius of Art.” Panel in the 
drawing-room of the artist’s own house... ... . 210 
Rosert Rep: “The Speech of James Otis.” Decora- 
tion in the State House, Boston, Mass. ...... 216 
Joun S. Sarcent: “The Dogma of the Trinity.” Deco- 
ration in the Public Library, Boston, Mass. 222 


Xvi ILLUSTRATIONS 


HERMAN T. ScHLADERMUNDT: Decoration in the art 
museum in the residence of Mr. Thomas F. Ryan . . 


Anprew T. Scuwartz: “Justice” .......... 


TABER SEARS: Frieze of the Apostles, Church of the 
Epiphany, Pittsburg, Pa. -. . 2 45: 


Epwarp Simmons: “The Civilization of the Northwest.” 
Panel in the Minnesota Capitol, St. Paul, Minn. . . 


W. T. Smepey: “The Awakening of a Commonwealth.” 
Panel in the Luzerne County Court-House, Wilkes- 
Barre, Pa... ka 


Assotr H. Tuayer: “Florence Protecting Her Arts.” 
Decoration in the vestibule of the Walker Art Gallery, 
Bowdoin College... Se 


Lous C. Tirrany: Tiffany Chapel, Crypt of Cathedral 
of St. John the Divine 3... . 2 a ee 


C. Y. Turner: “Washington Watching the Assault on 
Fort Lee.” Decoration for the Cleveland Court- 
Hisiwe 34043 8 be a a ee 


Louts Davin Vaituant: “The Picnic.” Decorative panel 


E.inu Vepper: “Rome.” Decoration in the Walker Art 
Gallery, Bowdoin College .......,.....,. 


_ Henry Oriver Warker: “The Boy of Winander.” Lu- 
nette in the Library of Congress ......... 


A. R. Witxetr: Panel in a court-room of the Mahoning 
County Court-House, Youngstown, Ohio . . nie 


228 


274 


se 


308 


f 
THE IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION 


I 
THE IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION 


I 


IT is the theory of a certain group that art is for 
artists, that it can be truly felt and known only by 
them, and that outside a charmed circle of their own 
no opinion is worth listening to. ‘There are others 
who believe that the mysterious force which created 
the beauty of the world, earth and sky, shore and 
sea, or, under the hand of man, what we call art, did 
not do it for the benefit of any close corporation, even 
of artists. 

Yet from the people who look most eagerly for 
that beauty come the artists, therefore they may 
claim the right to be pioneers and leaders. On the 
other hand, the public is as essential to the creation 
of art as is handle to blade; it drives and enforces 
the purpose of the artist. There is need for the ad- 
visory companionship of the cultured non-profes- 
sional, the statesman, historian, ethnographer, to 
insist upon types, to emphasize points in the cele- 
bration of wise policy, to show us how and where to 
illuminate the history of our people. But at their 

3 


4 IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION 


elbow must be the professional eye and hand to 
model those types, to compose that celebration, to 
mix the colors for that illumination, otherwise the 
noblest words may be set to sorry music. For the 
music’s harmony is made up of the diverse yet con- 
cordant contribution of many minds, the sober sense 
of one, the dreams of another, aspiration and re- 
straint, but all co-ordinated in the end by him who 
can confer plastic shape. 

Architecture has been called an occupation for 
kings, but it is because kings, presidents, and govern- 
ments can summon together the trained workers, — 
who approach by many paths, who bring brains and 
tools, eye, hand, and book-knowledge, that the gov- 
erning fiat may create a Parthenon, a cathedral, a 
Taj, or a national capitol. | 

If we try to recognize man’s earliest cravings for 
beauty, and if we hark backward to the voices which 
in the history of his development have been might- 
iest, to the Bible, the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, the 
great dramas of the Greeks, and later of the English, 
we realize that they were, for the enormous majority 
of men, voices. They made their appeal directly 
through the ear to the mind. The people sat in 
circle about sage or prophet or poet, and listened 
to him. In the Orient, which has stood compara- — 
tively still, and where few people read, you may see 
them doing it to-day. The admonition or sentiment 
or story was repeated by the listeners, repeated in 


IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION 5 


chorus; set to music it became the hymn or the 
popular song, and in such shape it made its strong- 
est uttered appeal to the mind and senses through the 
ear. But the eye of man admits an even more im- 
mediate appeal; with the rude and uncultivated 
the road to the mind from the eye seems still shorter 
than from the ear. Not even the Anacreontic song 
would stir quite as quickly as the carved and painted 
relief of nymph and faun, not even the hymn to the 
deity could strike as forcibly and immediately as the 
colossal goddess Athene shining in gold and ivory 
upon her pedestal. Not even the most fluent nar- 
rator could unfold his story so swiftly as could the 
frieze of the great altar of Pergamon. In the con- 
demnation of the graven image the Jewish law- 
giver relied mightily upon the spirituality of his 
people, but in the West, from Egypt to. Ireland, the 
tule of the iconoclast has been short. The temple 
and the cathedral spoke to the eye, but they spoke 
as loudly as did Iliad or Bible, and they told the 
same story. No one knew this better than did the 
priest, whether he were pagan or Christian, wore 
fillet or chasuble, or scapular indeed, for as monk he 
took up brush and chisel himself. All over the an- 
tique and medizval world, throughout the Greek 
islands, the mountains of Asia Minor, the plains of 
Europe, the forests of the north, the priest set up 
the artist as schoolmaster, and his school became the 
public building. 


6 IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION: 


**Pictures are the books of the ignorant,” said St. 
Augustine, and to appeal to their unlettered citizens 
the old republics used them, knowing that few can 
grasp an idea, but that a visible, tangible image is 
easily understood. 

In Athens twenty-two hundred years ago, in Rome 
eighteen hundred years ago, the man who lacked the 
power or the will or the time to read went to the 
public buildings to learn history, which he found 
there painted and sculptured so plainly that he 
learned without effort. To-day, the same citizen 
in Paris walks around the courtyard of the Inva- 
lides, and easily gets the battles of the republic by 
heart. At the Panthéon he is taught who civilized 
his country and who fought for it; he sees Charle- 
magne as civilizer, St. Louis as lawgiver, Jeanne 
d’Arc as liberator. When he goes for whatever 
business may be to the mairie or headquarters of 
his particular ward, he finds that famous artists 
have celebrated and dignified the various public 
functions performed there by carving and painting 
the walls with subjects which refer to them. At the 
Sorbonne, which is the temple of science and law, 
he is immediately taught something about things 
very desirable indeed to know, yet which would 
never have occurred to him if he had not seen them 
painted. He can’t help asking, for instance, what 
that means—that man in the fresco who is binding 
up a wounded soldier’s leg, while others in armor are 


Epwin H. Buiasurietp: Showing various shapes of panels 
common to the practice of a mural painter 


I. (Wide pendentive) Hudson County Court-House. II. (Narrow penden- 
tive) Youngstown Court-House. III. (Depressed lunette) Cleveland 
Trust Company. IV. (Portion of collar) Dome of Library of Congress 


IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION 7 


defending the wall, and a priest and acolyte stand 
by with crucifix and wafer to absolve the soldier if 
he has to die. Our onlooker is told that that is 
Ambroise Paré, in the sixteenth century, teaching 
men for the first time to tie up an artery. Then that 
modern Parisian workman realizes that once there 
was a time when a man badly hurt in a fight or an 
accident bled to death surely, and he thinks that 
things are better now, and in a vague way he re- 
members Ambroise Paré, not as a name perhaps, but 
as the bearded man in black trunk hose, working 
among armored soldiers of long ago. And so which- 
ever way he turns he sees on the walls the figures and 
the stories of those who have helped him in the past 
and have urged progress. 

The artist is teaching the lesson of intellectual de- 
velopment; teaching it with brush and chisel to the 
child who has not yet learned to read and the peas- 
ant who is too old to learn. Wise and ignorant alike 
can study the great picture-book and see how seven 
hundred years ago the monk Abelard taught French- 
men to think for themselves; how Louis, the king, 
learned to obey that he might learn to command; 
how Richelieu gave a great college to the people; 
how Cuvier and Buffon revealed the animals to 
man; how Papin and Lavoisier made fire and steam 
obey them and poisons turn to healing drugs. 

So he is taught of the benefactors of France, and 
when he next sees it he understands the great in- 


8 IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION 


scription in letters of gold upon the pediment of 
the Panthéon: “‘A grateful country to its great 
men.” 

It is acommon thing to say: “‘ How intelligent the 
French workman is; how he understands pictures!” 
But a great deal of this quickness comes from the 
fact that he has been learning from them all his life. 
And if this is good for the uneducated Frenchman, 
it is good, too, for the uneducated Irishman, German, 
Swede, Italian, who may stroll into some new city 
hall in our own country. This is the strongest ap- 
peal which can be made for public and municipal 
art, that it is a public and municipal educator. 


IT 


In writing a series of chapters upon decorative 
art as applied to public buildings, the first difficulty 
which I experience is that of making subdivisions of 
my subject which shall be in any way independent 
of each other. | 

Mr. Cox, in his illuminating lectures, has treated 
the classic spirit in art, and has devoted chapters to 
subject, drawing, color, modelling, etc. His general 
subject, running through all his book, is, as I under- 
stand it, the classic spirit and its influence upon the 
art of to-day, positive or potential. My subject 
will be the same reversed, that is to say, the Modern 
Tendency in Art as Influenced by the Spirit of the 


IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION 9 


Past. Under it will naturally fall the same subdi- 
visions of composition, drawing, color, and subject, 
which last may also be called significance in decora- 
tive work. These latter qualities are to some ex- 
tent separable, but there are other subjects which I 
wish to discuss and find practically inseparable. 
Such, for instance, are Catholicity of Thought, that 
is to say, a fair-minded consideration of the relations 
of ourselves and our methods to the personalities 
and methods of other people; the necessity for har- 
mony between architect, sculptor, and painter; the 
necessity for experience as well as talent in the 
decorative artist. 

Between such subjects there is constant interplay; 
catholicity can hardly be bred save by experience, 
which in turn is absolutely essential to harmony; so 
that the discussions of each chapter will to a cer- 
tain extent echo or foreshadow those which go before 
or come after. 

The creation of a great building, with its scale, 
proportions, distribution, and decoration—all of 
which qualities have the most intimate association 
with art—is a prodigious achievement. Its authors 
may learn from the whole field of endeavor of the 
past, and the greater their knowledge of bygone ex- 
perience, the better their own experience is likely to 
be; the more needs they have seen served, the more 
needs they will be able to meet. 

And yet there are restless souls to-day who cry 


10 IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION 


constantly for what they call originality, not only in 
relation to new needs, which is reasonable, but in 
relation to all old art, which is parricidal; and who 
would have us disinherit ourselves. Catholicity is 
the last thing they wish to entertain. But study of 
our legacy from the past shows us at once what 
various needs have been met and what a lesson may 
be learned from it. Throughout the following chap- 
ters the results of such study upon our modern 
practice, the effect, in sum, of tradition, will appear. 
It is perhaps well to begin by touching for a moment 
upon four or five of the principal phases of art evo- 
lution which have gone to the shaping of that tra- 
dition. | 

Our earliest masters in decoration, the Egyptians 
and Greeks, had a cloudless sky, and in their art 
they suited themselves to this condition with con- 
summate skill. The cathedral-builders of north- 
ern Europe more than a thousand years later 
had gray skies and dark rainy seasons, and they 
turned their churches into great stone cages and 
filled the huge openings with translucent color of 
glass. The churches of the Romanesque period in 
Italy and southern France, which geographically 
and climatically were half-way stations between 
Greece and the land of the northern Gothic, were 
intermediate also as to decoration, combining stained 
glass with a predominance of polychromatic paint- 
ing. 


IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION 11 


Here and to-day we may learn from all this past 
with its widely spaced periods. Our country is one 
of bright skies, but there is a time in our rainy 
eastern winters when stained glass is none too bril- 
liant for us; while in southern California and Texas, 
New Mexico and Arizona, the decorator of the future 
will remember the exterior polychromy of Greece 
and Egypt with infinite advantage. 

Once you are confronted in situ with the physical 
conditions of such countries, you learn a whole 
lesson almost in a moment. One does not forget 
one’s first Egyptian temple; mine was Denderah. 
As our procession of donkey riders filed along the 
dikes between the fields that led toward it from the 
Nile, we saw what seemed a little whitewashed 
stone hut in which workmen might lay away their 
tools. After a mile or two it grew into one of the 
mightiest temples of the world, but the blazing sun of 
Egypt had so swallowed up all modelling that from 
far off it looked like a lump of chalk, for its antique 
exterior coating of color had disappeared, rubbed 
away by the flying sand of two thousand years and 
the occasional, though very rare, rain-showers. In 
Egypt the noonday sky is a huge blotter—it drinks 
up all modelling; but at evening marvellous color 
streams back again with the lengthening shadows. 
The Egyptians understood these conditions per- 
fectly. They knew that sculpture in the round, 
placed out of doors, must be colossal in order to 


12 IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION 


present shadows big enough to be seen, for Ra, 
the sun-god, was pitiless to anything puny; and in 
decorating a wall for the open air they not only cut 
their figures in relief and painted them in strong 
colors, but often incised a deep line around the entire 
figure to stop out reflections and force the definition 
as far as they possibly could. To meet one of these 
reliefs indoors in a museum is to be surprised; to 
see it under the sun of Luxor or Kom Ombos is to 
understand in a moment the decorator’s point of 
view. ? 

In the British Museum, even in the Acropolis 
Museum of Athens, when, if you look at the Panathe- 
naic frieze, you think, ‘‘What a pity to have daubed 
those wonderful young men and maidens with paint,” 
you are seeing like a modern. But when you stand 
on the steps of the Parthenon and look upward to 
the place where the procession of riders and vase- 
carriers once marched along in marble, you begin to 
see more like an old Greek. Some remnants of re- 
lief-work are still up there, and the yellow blaze of 
reflected color from the pavement eats away every 
bit of their modelling. Now you know that the blue 
background was needed to enable you to make out 
the horses at all with their prancing legs. The old 
Greek, you may be sure, put on the strongest colors 
and even metal where he could, in bit and sword- 
hilt and spear-head; you understand now why he 
did it—and you have learned a lesson in decoration. . 


IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION 13 


How the schemes of color may have been originally 
planned in Greece and Egypt, and how much sub- 
tility, or what we call tone, they had, is hard to say— 
perhaps it isimpossible. I have examined much color 
and remain doubtful; pigment has subsisted vart- 
ously in various places. At Abydos yellow has most 
resisted time; at Dayr el Bahree red. At Philae in 
the ceilings and capitals there is a really exquisite 
succession of greens, blues, and whites, but in each 
case on further examination I have found traces of 
color now faded, which when fresh would have gone 
far toward what with our modern ideas we should 
consider a coarsening of the effect. The fact is that 
the Greek or Egyptian could afford to be violent 
with his exterior coloring, for right at his elbow was 
always the sun-god with his prodigious capacity for 
glazing and harmonizing everything in nature. 
When all is said, however, it is doubtful whether 
the decorators of Greece and Egypt were as subtly 
rich in their coloration as those later Greeks whom 
we name Byzantine, who came after Alexander the 
Great had opened the East, and who could thereby 
have in them more of what we call the Oriental feel- 
ing. The Roman Empire made great use of natural 
stones, adored marbles, and quarried them at the 
ends of the earth. Splendid as they were, they were 
not quite so solemnly gorgeous as the wonderful 
glass pastes which Byzantines compounded with 
their chemistry, rolled into sheets, cut up into little 


144 IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION 


cubes, and spread as a glorious surface for you and 
me to learn from still, upon the walls and vaultings 
of Constantinople, Ravenna and Palermo, Cefali 
and Venice. 

The men of the Middle Ages, Giotto and the rest, 
were more modest with their paint-box than By- 
zantine or Roman, and went back to plain water- 
color upon plaster. These story tellers—for the 
story, so despised nowadays, was what they sought 
first and last—have left in this same unpretending 
water-color of the fourteenth century some of the 
simplest yet completest and noblest decorations that 
have ever been painted, fruitful in lessons for us to- 
day. 

As for the general lesson, indeed, we have now run 
the gamut. What came after the fourteenth century 
was, with one important exception, a recasting of 
older methods by which we are still profiting. The 
Renaissance used the bronze and marble of Roman 
decoration, the mosaic of the Byzantines, and the 
water-color of the Middle Ages, adding the one im- 
portant factor of oil-painting. How much oil-paint- 
ing was independent, how much it was based on 
tempera, and just when it became pure oil-painting 
we do not know, perhaps never shall. The question 
is very near to being the most interesting one before 
the investigator of methods to-day. 

Incidentally in the fifteenth century Italian 
artists studied anatomy and perspective. These we 


‘(Q[vos SuLMOYsS ‘s]uv NIaxa 
aq} jo sainsy a1v MO[eq) svAu¥d jo uoNvodde ur soAvUsa]Y sv PpoAJOSoI soInsy sevoydnp YUM puv ‘BulIOs IO; 
yo, soovds paquiedun yy ‘ssoodo1d ur ‘Jourded 23¥1G UISUODSIAA JO UMOID OWIOP JO} UOIIRIODIIG, :@1MIAHSVIg “]] NIMG WY 


IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION — 15 


need not discuss, save to note that the painters fell 
so much in love with the new sciences as to force 
too much modelling into their frescoes, and thereby 
so confuse them that a process of elimination under 
the hands of Michelangelo, Raphael, or Titian, be- 
came necessary before decoration could be broad- 
ened sufficiently to fill its fullest scope of excellence. 
_ There we have it, then, to look back upon and study, 
the Greek and Egyptian understanding of conditions 
applicable to out-and-in-door polychromy, the metals 
and marbles of the Romans, the mosaic and glass of 
the Byzantines and the Middle Ages, the water- 
color and tempera of the fourteenth and fifteenth 
centuries, the oil-painting of the sixteenth century, 
the revived classicism of a while ago, the roman- 
ticism of yesterday, and the impressionism of to-day. 
What have we done with it? What are we doing? 
What are we going to do? 


ITI 


To emphasize the importance of that which we 
call the decoration of public buildings will be the 
burden of what I have to say first in these chapters. 
Next will come the study of the conditions which 
are most favorable or unfavorable to our young 
students taking an active part in this decoration; 
for in the hands of the rising generation of artists 
lies the future of American art. 


16 IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION 


The decoration of public buildings is the most im- 
portant question in the consideration of that same 
art of the future, just as it always has been in the 
past of any and every national art from the time 
of the pyramid-builders down. Indeed, it passes far 
beyond the question of art to the questions of morals 
and patriotism and general culture. The temples, 
the cathedrals, the town halls have been the arch- 
schoolmasters of the ages. Eons and eons of years 
went to the preparation of these great teachers of 
mankind, for the first pupils were pupils of nature: 
and the aboriginal men who were the original art- _ 
ists had first to evolve their schoolmasters, then in 
turn to be developed by them. 

When man in his primeval childhood lost his tail 
but kept his curiosity and his imitativeness, he began 
to scratch or whittle with a flint upon a bone or a 
stone doubtful semblances of things he saw about 
him. He commenced as an individualist; he scooped 
up the colored earths from the edges of the puddles, 
or the juice of crushed berries, and painted them upon 
his own body, or smeared the colors onto the walls - 
of his own cave. 

After long, long steps—so long that they are in- 
conceivable to us, so long that all the time which has 
elapsed from the rigging of the first rude sail on a 
prehistoric dugout down to the latest turbine- 
motored sea-going monster is but short as compared 
with the evolution of one from another of human- 


IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION 17 


ity ’s primitive contrivings—the arts began to grow a 
little. Man learned to weave fibre into some sort 
of a stuff, to form clay into some sort of a vessel, 
and as he was afraid of a mysterious deity, who could 
hurt him with wind or rain or blast him with light- 
ning, he honored that same deity not only with the 
fruit of his spear and club, but with the work of his 
hands in weaving and modelling. And so the pre- 
historic man from an individualist became to a cer- 
tain extent a collectivist, and the arts entered the 
service of the public. 

As they grew, and as metal-working was better 
understood, and glass was invented, and textiles 
were improved, in what we call the antique world, 
the world of the people who lived about the basin 
of the Mediterranean, life, in spite of its hardness 
and cruelty, grew very beautiful in some respects; 
and of all that life, covering thousands of years of 
time, thousands of square miles of space, almost the 
only message that has come down to us is the message 
of the graphic arts. The great sister art of poetry 
sounded as loud a note of celebration, but a very 
large part of what we know about the peoples of 
early antiquity comes from the work which they 
created with their hands to please their minds 
through their eyes. 

And the very flower of this creation went to the 
buildings which sheltered the priest and the king and 
represented law and majesty, sacred and profane. 


18 IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION; . 


However beautiful the little statuettes, the figurines 
and vases of daily Greek life might be, the greatest 
works went to the temple, and it was of the colossal 
statue at Olympia that the contemporaneous his- 
torian wrote: “No Greek can be accounted truly 
fortunate who has not seen the Zeus of Phidias.”’ As 
art penetrated the north, the same conditions gov- 
erned; the glass which with its colors helped to make 
the tables of Greeks and Egyptians gay, grew into’ 
solemnity in the basilica’s mosaics, and into splendor 
in the windows of the cathedrals. 

The names of the public buildings are the century- 
marks of the ages. Just as King Edward raised a 
stone cross wherever the body of Eleanor was laid 
down on its progress to Westminster, so wherever 
the footprints of the spirit of civilization have rested 
most firmly some milestone of human progress has 
risen to be called Parthenon or Notre Dame, Giotto’s 
Tower or Louvre, and to teach from within and 
without, by proportion and scale, by picture and 
statue, the history of the people who build it; to 
celebrate patriotism, inculcate morals, and to stand 
as the visible concrete symbol of high endeavor—the 
effort of man in his own handiwork to prove himself 
worthy of the Creator whose handiwork he is. 


IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION _ 19 


IV 


Why, then, if the very names of these monu- 
ments attest their importance, further support the 
attestation? It is because, while the average in- 
telligent American will admit what I have just said, 
he will forget all about it the moment he is con- 
fronted by his concrete problem in this field and by 
what he calls the necessities of the situation. 

And what are the necessities of a situation? To 
instance them let us take some famous town hall as 
the most representative of possible buildings—say 
the town hall of Brussels, and in it a room which 
may be the salle des mariages. Now, in a perfectly 
plain, plastered room, costing very little money, you 
could marry just as many people a day and shelter 
them just as well from rain, heat, and cold as in a 
room made charming with decorations, and in a 
building famous forever by its Gothic loveliness. 

But is there not something to be said for this 
latter quality? The man in the street may reply: 
“After all, it is no wonder that your town halls of 
Belgium, your merchants’ exchange of Perugia, your 
people’s palaces of Siena and Florence were famous 
for their art. They had nothing but their art to 
boast of. We to-day could not for a moment tolerate 
their inconvenience, their lack of telephones and 
heat and elevators; and in the interests of business 


20 IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION 


to-day we demand something better. We propose 
for ourselves infinitely greater convenience of every 
kind, and shall concentrate ourselves upon that.” 

And why? If you are already masters of the 
situation as regards convenience, and if at the same 
time you realize that qualities for which you have 
relatively little aptitude, decorative qualities, have 
made those old public buildings famous through all 
time, why, I ask it again with emphasis, do you not 
give serious thought to your weak points as well as — 
to your strong ones? 

Do you say that you neglect the artistic side of 
the question because the time for it is gone and past, 
and that we as a people are fitted only for the prac- 
tical? Such a statement may be emphatically — 
denied. American art, on the contrary, is advancing 
rapidly. The landscape and portrait schools are fully — 
abreast of anything immediately modern, and the 
school of decorative painting is following closely 
after the other two. i 

It is seriousness of purpose that is lacking, not 
capacity for attacking the decorative problem. If 
once this seriousness can obtain, if once the public — 
can be convinced of the prodigious importance of 
good decoration of the municipal, State, and national 
buildings, all the rest will follow as surely as noon 
follows morning, for there is plenty of capacity in 
America—it only needs to be developed. 

It can be developed only by experience, and by — 


IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION — 21 


experience along special lines. This fact we must 
grasp firmly, and accept absolutely; otherwise we 
shall stumble along, delaying our opportunity, and 
expending our effort, our money, and our most 
precious time unwisely. 

It is quite true that at the first blush this advo- 
cacy of the importance of good decoration applied 
to public buildings seems in itself unimportant, be- 
cause the public appears quite ready to grant every- 
thing—but it is only an appearance. The auditor 
replies to the speaker: ‘“‘Of course, we recognize the 
importance of decoration of public buildings. Of 
course, we realize that the temples and palaces and 
cathedrals shine in the past like beacons, and will 
project their light beyond us into no one knows how 
remote a future. Of course, we feel that Phidias 
and Michelangelo and Titian are names to conjure 
with.” This the objector representing the public 
will say readily, and easily, and perfunctorily, having 
become accustomed to say it through centuries. 
But having glibly stated this recognition and reali- 
zation of the greatness of the example of the past, 
he only too often cancels his words by the indiffer- 
ence of his attitude. 

Frequently the citizen, who is to be part owner of 
the new State capitol or court-house, having spoken 
trippingly of its importance as a factor for good, 
turns the whole matter over to a special committee, 
then thinks no more of it at all, save perhaps to boast 


22 IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION 


now and then in an open letter to the press of how 
fine the new court-house or State house is going to 
be, and how much bigger and better than the one 
over the river in an adjoining State. 

And all this in spite of the fact that he is a good 
citizen, honestly proud of the development of his 
State, that the committeeman is a capable commit- 
teeman, prudent and eager for the welfare of the 
commonwealth. It is all because, when the matter 
in hand relates to what we call art, they do not con- 
sider—they wil] not consider. Art, they think, re- 
lates to feeling, and they, the citizens, the committee- 
men, many of them at least, most of them as yet, I 
fear, believe that every man has a divine right to 
settle for himself any question which relates chiefly 
to feeling. They reiterate the worn phrase, “I 
know what I like,” and they sit content while the 
real beauty-lover mourns. 

Fortunately, the real beauty-lover is adding to 
himself many recruits from the ranks of the said 
citizens and committeemen. To every one of these 
we appeal, and with their aid we shall win, for beauty 
put into concrete form can work wonders, and in 
the end convinces. When the artist is dead and can 
paint no longer he begins to earn great sums for the 
inheritors of his work. When the Greek temple has 
become the product of a vanished civilization and 
unreproducible, we go thousands of leagues to visit 


it. When we have recognized that the fresco is the 


h a paper model 


€ wit 


| 


. 


rying sca 


i8 


Placing the figures in a decoration 


IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION — 23 


outcome of an age and a spirit which have departed, 
and that we cannot order its counterpart into being, 
we saw it from the wall and transfer it with infinite 
care to canvas, and buy it at a great price for our 
museums. 

And so we recognize the past, and forget that the 
present is the past of to-morrow and is worth pro- 
viding for. To-day’s recognition of the art of the 
past is phenomenal. So far as we know, such a con- 
dition of things has obtained only once before. It 
began when Mummius, fresh from the sack of Cor- 
inth, brought back to Rome chariot-loads of Greek 
statues and paintings, battered at first by rough 
handling, but finally paid for with enormous sums, as 
the philhellenism of the Mzcenases under the Julians 
and Flavians and Antonines spread from Rome to 
the Rhine and Britain and covered Italy, Gaul, and 
Spain with their palace museums and villa museums, 
which they filled with objects big and little, either 
inherited or imitated from the art of Greeks or 
Egyptians, foreigners and predecessors. To-day the 
researches of the Morellis and Bodes and Berensons 
rival the antiquarian interests of a Hadrian, even 
though they may not call archaistic cities into being 
by imperial fiat; and the amazing collections of a 
group of American art-lovers recall what Fried- 
lander tells us of the heaping up of artistic riches by 
the senatorial families of ancient Rome, and leave 
far behind the treasures gathered by such famous 


24 IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION 


moderns as Fouquet and Jabach. Fortunes are ex- 
pended upon our collections, public and private. 
The soil of Eastern countries is literally sifted in 
sieves (I have seen it done) for the yield of tiny ob- 
jects which go into Western museums. ‘The castles 
of Britain and the Continent prove expugnable as 
the family portraits pass outward to the dealer; and 
the princes of the past seem to have bred and fought 
in a measure for the benefit of the modern collector, 
while the imitation of old pictures and treasure of 
all sorts has become so subtle that the counterfeit 
can be detected by only the cleverest of museum di- 
rectors, and sometimes will no more down than will 
Banquo’s ghost. 

Great diligence, great intelligence, and great gener- 
osity are being accorded to the collection and distri- 
bution of the art of the past. Great sums of money, 
great rivalry, and great good-will are given to the © 
collection even of contemporaneous painting and 
sculpture. It seems as if in modern art only that 
which goes to the decoration of the public building 
has been (in certain cases at least) lightly con- 
sidered, and such art should be to every one the 
most important in the entire modern field. 

Public and municipal art is a public and municipal 
educator. The decoration of temples and cathedrals 
and town halls has naturally taught patriotism, mor- 
als, esthetics, in a far larger sense than has that of 
private palaces or houses, admirable as the latter has 


IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION ~ 25 


often been. The passion for collection is, of course, 
the result of European precedent; but the American 
who, even making allowance for the fashion of a mo- 
ment, can enter so passionately into rivalry for the 
possession of masterpieces of the past, will inevitably 
advance in perceptiveness as general culture grows. 
Intrinsic weight will establish itself against the glam- 
our of celebrity (for it must be admitted that, like 
other amateurs, our collector sometimes buys a great 
name on a poor picture, instead of a better canvas 
with a less famous signature), and in time he who 
patronized the best art of the past so well will al- 
most insensibly go on to acquiring the best art of his 
day. When he does, it is for the art students of the 
rising generation to see to it that some of the best 
contemporaneous art is in America. 

It is true that in our American art, which is being 
developed, mural painting is a late comer, but it is 
a late comer because of all the branches of art it has 
become the most complicated in its organization. 
And although it is recent with ws, it is a notable fact 
that it is older than history—is, indeed, the oldest of 
the arts. To try to place one branch of art above an- 
other would be to waste time in the attempt to sus- 
tain an untenable proposition. Decorative painting, 
portrait-painting, landscape-painting, are the peers of 
each other, and attain exchangeable headship in 
accord with the temperament and preference of 
those who practise and those who admire. Yet it is 


26 IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION 


undeniable that, of the three, decorative painting is 
the oldest and the most inclusive. Within the last 
twenty years there has arisen a wide-spread inter- 
est in it, and it has been celebrated generously, and 
praised for being what it really is — one of the high- 
est forms of artistic expression. Nevertheless, there 
are still many art-lovers, and even some artists, 
who think of decoration as of something compara- 
tively easy to do, the occupation of the man who is 
not quite big enough to depend wholly upon his own 
personality, but who backs himself by the resources 
of architecture, and hides his poverty or weakness of 
expression behind a screen of ornament. There was 
never a greater fallacy than that which attributes 
an even relatively weak personality to the successful 
decorator, as I shall hope to demonstrate by future 
argument. Because decoration is applied to spoon- 
handles as well as to towers and domes, the superficial 
often catalogue it hastily as a minor art, forgetting 
that in being so inclusive it must also be enormously 
exacting. | 

The public has not yet wholly outgrown certain 
antiquated notions. Fifty years ago the “‘fresco- 
painter, ” who was invariably an Italian or a German, 
lived and worked in the vestibule between the *“storm 
door” and the “front door.” Sculpture at the same 
epoch—all this was in the days of what Mr. Henry 
James called medieval New York—dwelt in a tray 
upon the head of a vendor, also an Italian. The tray 


IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION — 27 


contained plaster lambs and busts of Washington 
and statuettes of the “Little Samuel Woke” variety, 
and it did not go up the “stoop” to the Mzcenas 
of the moment. It went down the steps to the 
area, and had to give the countersign to Bridget be- 
fore it met the eyes of her mistress. In one of John 
Leech’s pictures, a flunky, with calves appropriate to 
his position, stands upon the steps barring the way, 
and says to the vendor, who holds out a plaster 
Apollo Belvedere: ‘‘Yes, I dessay it’s all very fine, 
but it’s not my idea of a figger.”” Just so, many lay- 
men, and as I have noted before, even some artists, 
still say: ‘‘Yes, decoration is all very fine,” but 
make the mental reservation: “‘It’s not my idea of 
art; it has neither frame nor shadow-box, and it does 
not figure in a catalogue.” 

In the main, however, decoration has met with a 
most generous recognition on the part of both artists 
and public, and it deserves it; for, I repeat, it is the 
oldest, the most inclusive, and the most exacting 
of the arts. It began with the cave-dweller hacking 
bone into rude suggestion of men and animals, or 
scratching outlines upon the rock; it developed into 
beauty applied to utility, and it culminated as a 
supreme teacher, through the arts, of patriotism, 
morals, and history, in temples and cathedrals 
and town halls. The greatest artists who ever lived 
have been the acolytes of this ministrant decora- 
tion—Phidias, Donatello, Michelangelo, Raphael, 


28 IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION 


Leonardo, Correggio, Veronese, Rubens, to name 


only a few of them, were decorator-painters and 


decorator-sculptors. 

It was in directing the sculptural ensemble of the 
Parthenon, in building up the great altar of Padua, 
in carrying the painting from the domes down the 
pendentives and walls of Parma, in composing the 
many consecutive or concentric ceiling panels of 
Venice, in covering and making glorious the barn- 
like nakedness of the plastering to the Sistine Chapel, 
that these protagonists of art attained to some of 
their highest flights. They showed that man mov- 
ing easily under the restraint of limitation, and 
bending the conventionalism of decoration to the 
expression of his purpose, can manifest as much of 
power as man moving freely. Design, one of the 
very highest and most exacting elements of art, 
must be ever present in decoration, and, above all, the 
history of decoration demonstrates that not even 
the most brilliant executant can lastingly succeed in 
it unless he possess that power of tension which is 
given only to the healthy in the arts, as elsewhere in 
nature. 

The greatest of artists, then, have been decorators, 
and a high development of the special branches of 
decorative painting and sculpture has been co- 
incidental with the periods during which the most 
famous schools of art have flourished. Holland fur- 
nishes the only exception, and even her exception is a 


Epwin H. Biasurietp: Trying scale of figures for 
Wisconsin dome 


IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION 29 


qualified one. Her rejection of the doctrines and 
forms of the mother church, the arch-patron, greatly 
curtailed the output of monumental painting in gen- 
eral; and the Dutchman was by nature a realist pur 
sang. One man, their greatest, Rembrandt, was 
filled with the decorative sense, a composer of love- 
liest and also grandest patterns of light and shade. 
But it was just when he created his almost magical 
picture, the so-called “Night Watch,” that his 
fellow-citizens began to misunderstand his art, and 
to neglect him; and according to his biographer, M. 
Michel, the canvas which he frankly undertook as a 
decorative commission was not a success in the eyes 
of his contemporaries, and was not preserved in 
its entirety. Nevertheless, in many a composition 
of light and shade, Rembrandt shows as much feel- 
ing for decorative beauty and even grandeur of 
pattern as any man who ever lived. 


V 


Such various men of various times have vibrated 
to the appeal of decorative art that we may surely 
look for a response among our own people. The 
American spirit is sympathetic toward many things. 
More than a score of years ago I went to Washing- 
ton with the first committee which made an attempt 
to obtain free importation of foreign art. We sat 
up nearly all night in the sleeping-car considering 


30 IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION 


ways and means; we agreed that we must not talk 
sentiment, we must talk economics, appeal to the 
practical American mind of our legislators, and show 
them that good art is financially desirable. But when 
we reached the Capitol we found that it was pre- 
cisely sentiment which appealed to senator and rep- 
resentative alike. They patted us on the back, and 
said: “It is fine to find you young fellows [mind 
you this was more than a quarter of a century ago] 
asking not to be protected.” Thus, you see, sen- 
timent does reach the American legislator. And 
for those who wish to hear the other side, we may 
prove easily enough that good national art is a good 
national asset. 

To begin with, art confers immortality. A noble 
artistic representation immortalizes the cause sym- 
bolized, the thought embodied, the individual por- 
trayed. “The bust outlasts the throne, the coin 
Tiberius,” is not merely the fine phrase of a poet. For 
about the concrete representation crystallizes and 
remains the thought. Not all Thucydides impresses 
the mind of the average man as swiftly and forcibly 
as does his first vision of the Acropolis. Toward the 
monument which stands for cherished cause or in- 
spired idea or revered individual the mind turns in 
instinctive patriotism, and if in the monument you 
find commemoration plus beauty, the latter quality 
gilds the halo of pre-eminence, and even outlasts it, 
since men’s memories may fade but their power for 


IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION — 31 


visual receptiveness is constant. The votaries at 
the shrine of patriotism become the visitors to the 
temple of beauty, and that beauty holds with it 
still and always some memory of the good and great 
who are celebrated by its outward forms. 

If you think I am becoming too poetical, remember 
that these visiting pilgrims bring throughout the 
ages, in wallet or toga, bosom or breeches pocket, 
obolus and denarius and dollar, which go into the 
market to keep things stirring. Let us pass from the 
waxed tablets of the guardians of Athene’s temple 
to the ledgers of the bookkeepers of a modern hotel, 
and take the little city of Perugia in Italy as an ex- 
ample. 

Forty years ago it was quiet indeed. To-day you 
have big hotels and ultra-modern trolley-cars which 
pull straight up the hill in twelve minutes the 
travellers who used to lumber around long curves 
in an antiquated bus. Do you say that the old way 
was the more picturesque? Perhaps I agree with 
you, but we are talking now about the financial ad- 
vantages of good art. The clean hotels are at least 
an unmixed blessing; and who gave them, who made 
the town cleaner and more prosperous than it had 
been for four hundred years? The hotel-keepers 
whose money has come from the visitors to the 
famous frescoes in the Sala del Cambio, the Hall of 
the Exchange, and to the sculptures of the great 
fountain on the square. The prosperity of Perugia 


32 IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION 


has come straight off the palette of Perugino, and 
the marble dust from the chisel of Giovanni Pisano 
has turned to gold dust and coin. Has any Fouquet 
or Colbert, any minister of finance in France greatly 
excelled our lady, the Venus of Milo, as a bringer of 
revenue! Imagine the sums which have been paid 
for casts, engravings, photographs, printed books 
and pamphlets about her goddesship, and add to 
these the money given to steamer, railway, and hotel 
by those to whom her presence in Paris was one of the 
most powerful magnets which drew them thither. And 
as 1s Paris, so are other capitals; and as is Perugia, 
so are fifty other Italian towns; and as they are, so 
are Washington, Boston, and St. Paul beginning to 
be. Ask the doorkeepers of the Library of Congress, 
the Public Library of Boston, the State Capitol of 
St. Paul, how many visitors pour into their buildings 
on holidays, and even on week-days. 

It is perhaps a low plane, this of the consideration 
of the money value to hotel-keeper and shopman 
and railway of the visiting tourist; but its corollary 
is upon a higher plane, aid is a better support to our 
contention which is for the stimulus and education 
returned to that same visitor as a thousandfold the 
equivalent of his money. If the chronicles of France, 
and Germany, and Italy inspire the citizens of those 
lands to patriotism, the eyes of the citizens—and, 
through their eyes, their hearts and minds—are even 
more quickly caught by the sculptured or painted 


IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION — 33 


figures of the heroes of the chronicles. The French- 
man who hears the word Austerlitz sees before his 
mental vision the little man in the gray overcoat 
and three-cornered hat, the Napoleon of Raffet or 
Charlet. The descendants of the soldiers of the great 
Frederick see Alter Fritz in powder and pigtail in 
the pictures of Menzel. We Americans know Lin- 
coln in the sculpture of St. Gaudens or French, or 
Washington as Houdon and Stuart saw him; even 
the theatrically improbable Washington crossing the 
Delaware is not without his uses to those who meet 
him in Leutze’s picture. 

Minor men are immortalized if the muse of the 
sculptor’s art lay her hand upon their shoulder. 
Gattamelata and Colleone were after all only hired 
captains, though among the best of the generals of 
the Italian Renaissance. They would have been for- 
gotten fifty times over had they been emphasized by 
nothing beyond their personal worth, but to-day their 
names are known to the cultured of every country, 
their physical presentment to the artists of every 
land, because four hundred years ago they were 
horsed and harnessed by great sculptors and set on 
high as unfading memories. 

As you walk the streets of Paris to-day among 
hurrying men and women, at every thousand feet 
or so there crosses your path the shadow of a figure 
which is not hurrying but still, and which is above 
you—pedestalled! You look up and add to the 


34. IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION 


picture which has passed before your eyes and — 
through your mind, of sculptured or painted moni- 
tors, martyrs to principle, or defenders of the land— 
men who have fought with hands and head for their 
country; who have printed books and burned at the 
stake for the principles which those books enunci- 
ated; who have struggled to save the commonwealth, 
and died under the guillotine for their service; who 
have taught the blind, or led the keenest-sighted; 
who have analyzed, painted, written, manufactured 
—who, in a word, have helped in the past and to- 
day, thanks to art, are still helping every thoughtful 
on-looker. 

Assuredly, then, the importance of art, which is the 
subject, in its widest sense, of this chapter, has al- 
ways been demonstrated by our reason, our emo- 
tions, even our instincts. As aboriginal savages we 
instinctively decorated our bodies. Childhood in the 
race resembles the childhood of the individual human 
animal, which loves bright-colored objects of any 
kind, and this primeval impulse to decorate our- 
selves is so mighty that it has proved one of the 
bases of commerce throughout the ages. Man him- 
self has been first subject of his own arts, and woman, 
probably as docile to receive, has been even more 
lastingly subjective. A delightful prototype is An- 
atole France’s girl in “L’Ile des Pingouins,” a book 
in which the aboriginal inhabitants of the island go 
about in artless nakedness. Captured running upon 


Sealine’ 


ta 


Travelling scaffold used at the Library of Congress 


wt 


IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION ~— 35 


the beach, the girl is dressed by the progressive saint, 
who has brought silks and satins to the Pingouins. 
At first she struggles like a snared wild beast, then 
as the gown begins to work its spell, and as the 
saint commences to lace her up, she looks over her 
shoulder and, critically surveying her waist, says: 
“You may pull it in a little tighter still.” 

’ With the peoples of antiquity, particularly of 
Greek antiquity, it was something the same as with 
Anatole France’s girl. They were natural beauty- 
lovers and they wanted to make beauty a part of 
everything! Athens, even while she held the head- 
ship of the antique world, spent more money upon 
her art than upon her wars; and when it came to 
taxing the people to pay for Athene’s peplos—to a 
question of beauty and art, in short—the Athenian 
taxpayer said, like the Penguin girl: “You may 
squeeze me a little tighter still.”’ They loved the 
arts so ardently, the ancients, that they made the 
features of their beloved immortal. 


“The face that launched a thousand ships 
And burnt the topless towers of Ilion” 


is still the prototype of imperishable loveliness, and 
this earliest sung of beauties was potential after 
more than two thousand years to kindle poetic fire 
in an Elizabethan age, second only, if second at all, 
in brightness to that of Homeric times. 


36 IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION 


If instinct impelled man toward the arts, our 
reason and our emotions, hand in hand, lengthened 
and strengthened the chain of masterpieces. Some- 
times, as in the Parthenon, reason shone brightest; 
again, at Karnak or in the cathedrals emotion beck- 
oned us more compellingly into the mystery of the 
groves of stone and the jewelled light. But always 
in the past, whether exerting its force emotionally 
or rationally, art was a mighty power; and to-day, 
in spite of our diversion toward the path of her sister, 
science, we shall find, if we try to retrace it in thought 
and study, that the roadway which leads down to us 
from Attic Athens or Tuscan Florence may be fol- 
lowed step by step. It is less clearly marked here 
and there, but it is continuous; in the long chain 
not one link is broken. Art is a Jacob’s ladder 
of angels. The masters, the Michelangelos and 
Rembrandts and Velasquezes, come down to us in a 
glory so great that they dazzle us a bit, then go up 
again into heaven, where they belong; but we may, 
any of us, crowd about the foot of the ladder and look 
through the crevices of the clouds till at least a little 
of the radiance comes out and warms us. And if we 
look with honest eyes, devoid of affectation or in- 
sincerity, we may see many things, and may fall 
in love, each of us in his own fashion. One of us 
may love the broad mastery of Greek modelling, 
another the delicacy of the Florentine primitives. 
Velasquez’s flat gray planes or Titian’s winy reds and 


IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION 37 


tawny browns are there for whoever chooses them; 
and one may pass from the nervous, vigorous, as- 
sured breadth of Frans Hals to the quiet, smooth, as- 
sured breadth of a Van Eyck interior. We may 
stand ringed around by miracles, all different, yet 
each in its way a well-nigh perfect example of the 
art of the past, and learn from it to practise the art 
of the present, which, as our art, to-morrow again 
will become that of the past. 

All these things I have said before, and shall say 
again and again, for the public consciousness, sen- 
sitive to many things, is dull to others; and if I had 
to raise a statue to the typical promoter, whether of 
matters spiritual or material, I would make him a 
god Thor, and gird him with his weapon to hammer, 
hammer, hammer, again and again in the same place. 

And he would be no serene god, no deified 
Harmonious Blacksmith, but a striker of discords. 
First, and longest, and hardest, he would smite in 
beating out from the amorphousness of our indiffer- 
ence a conviction—the conviction of the impor- 
tance of public art—that it should be at least as 
good as the very best, because placed the most con- 
spicuously, and therefore of all art that most likely 
to impress and teach the people. 

Next, he would have to strike long and hard in 
emphasis of the importance of harmony, the mutual- 
ity of architect, sculptor, and painter in any decora- 
tive undertaking, to strike until he had welded the 


38 IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION 


three into one ingot and fashioned from it a weapon 
ten times as tempered to its purpose as it ever could 
have been in the personality of any one of these 
artists divided from their trinity. Divided, the 
architect, sculptor, and painter, however sincere, 
would hinder each other in the production of a great 
building; united, they are all-powerful. The Thor’s 
hammer has turned the ingot into a battering ram 
which can level everything that interferes with the 
desired result. , 

The next thing to be placed on the anvil should 
be fashioned into a symbol of the importance of 
experience in the decorative artist, not the mural 
painter alone, for I am no longer separating him 
from architect and painter, but the decorative art- 
ist, architect, sculptor, or painter. 

Talent is common to all real artists, and to no artist 
is all-round talent and culture more needful than 
to the decorator; but upon one side, and that a very 
widely embracing and very exacting one, the dec- 
orator is perforce a specialist. Experience, reiter- 
ated and hard-bought experience, is absolutely nec- 
essary to him, and in no wise is the lengthening 
repetition of hammer strokes more typical than it is 
of this continuity of effort, this long succession, now 
of essay, now of blunder, now of half success, fusing 
at last into a harmonious result, triumphant and 
perfect. 

If our Thor has driven deeply into the public 


IMPORTANCE OF DECORATION 39 


mind the conviction of these three things: that public 
art shall be of the best, that there shall be harmony 
between architect, sculptor, and painter, and that 
not only talent but past experience shall be demanded 
from all three, the rest is a matter of detail. 


IJ 


HARMONY BETWEEN BUILDING COM- 
MISSIONER AND ARCHITECT 


it 


HARMONY BETWEEN BUILDING COM- 
MISSIONER AND ARCHITECT 


I 


WE have seen that the intrinsic importance of dec- 
oration has been attested completely and lastingly 
in a line of world-famous buildings reaching from 
Egypt and Greece eastward across Asia and west- 
ward over Europe, and binding the age of the pyra- 
mid-builders to our own by an unbroken chain. If 
we consider its importance in our own times, and 
discuss the relation of decoration in general and 
decorative painting in particular to our modern 
needs and practices, we soon realize that, although 
the importance of good decoration is patent through- 
out history, the eyes of the average man to-day are 
not open to it—above all, are not open to the fact 
that it can exist only through harmony between 
those who create it, and that this harmony must be 
bought at the price of experience, good-will, and 
money. 

It is dificult to divide a consideration of decora- 

43 


44 HARMONY BETWEEN BUILDING 


tion into chapters, and especially in considering 
this same harmony, experience, and practice, for 
they are inextricably bound together. Experience 
and experiment, indeed, are like the children’s game 
of laying hands one upon another, and making re- 
peated withdrawals of the under hand to place it 
again on top of the pile. Experiment breeds ex- 
perience, which must again draw upon experiment 
for further procedure in order to assure harmony 
in practice, and thus you have continuous inter- 
relation and interdependence. 

Consideration of harmony between the public, the 
architect, and the mural painter must, as far as may 
be in these chapters, cover the points which make 
it difficult, though possible, for the creators of the 
public building to be harmonious. The difficulties - 
may be roughly divided into those relating to choice 
of creative and executive artists (through competi- 
tion or appointment) to the misconceptions arising 
between the building commissioner and the archi- 
tect, between the building commissioner and the 
mural painter, between the architect and the mural 
painter, between various mural painters working 
together. 


To-day when we build a State capitol or a great 
court-house the enterprise is chronicled as an event; 
a deal of paper is covered with print to tell us that 
such and such a thing costs so much more or less 


Sinqstiiepy “eruvatAsuuag jo joudeg oaivig oy} 
JO BpUNIOI UleU oY7 UL 9},9UN] SANeVIOIE] =, "YIAVH 941 Jo soinsvoiy, oy] Bul[vaAdyY sousIOG,, :Aaaay “VY NIMaY 


UWoKIUCVD GD S2ILND AQ 2YHIAAZOD Caqgi7 “EF uznapy Ag sys4kgo7 


f) 


3 
SS 


oy 


COMMISSIONER AND ARCHITECT 4s. 


than was expected; that So-and-so, the expert, has 
expressed this, that, and the other view regarding 
the excellence of the result to be obtained, and that in 
a general way this palace of the people is to combine 
first-rate practicality with artistic magnificence of 
the highest order. We are led to understand, in- 
deed we lead ourselves to understand, that our ap- 
-preciation of the situation reaches the level of its 
intrinsic importance. 

We are vastly mistaken. It does not attain that 
level. It is all well, or much of it well as far as it 
goes, but it does not go far enough. Our architects 
are able, sincere, enthusiastic, and hard-working. 
They stand ready to serve us admirably; but we, the 
public, do not strengthen their hands as we should, 
because we do not appreciate the importance of 
what they create for us. It is of quite transcendent 
importance. The public buildings are the houses 
of the people, and whether cathedral, temple, court- 
house, capitol, or city hall, these houses in the 
past have been landmarks of progress which have 
lasted as long as printed and written records. They 
have been beacons in history which have outlasted 
the splendor of the dynasties that lighted them. 
Each one of these buildings has been the house of 
God and of the people as well, for each has been 
raised to enshrine the workings of the law, to sym- 
bolize aspiration, to evidence outward beauty, to 
stand for the attributes of deity. Such a building 


46 HARMONY BETWEEN BUILDING 


is the very ark of the covenant, and its creation 
means such potentiality for instruction and edifica- 
tion that the man in the street has by no means 
fulfilled his duty in voting appropriations for its — 
construction, and then turning his back upon it with 
little thought save a recommendation that there 
shall not be undue waste. For such a house there 
should be rather largess than economy; and it is 
pathetic that in a case where the very best of the 
best is needed, and may be made imperishable in 
stone and bronze and mosaic, to become a teacher 
for millennials, a concrete realization of beauty, the 
property of every man rich and poor—it is pathetic, 
it is deplorable indeed, that our first thought should 
be to recommend that it shall not cost too much. 

If the economy suggested meant expenditure 
otherwise and better applied, the saving would be 
worth while. But few objects are as worthy, and 
why not spend lavishly on the creation of a public 
building? To begin with, it is yours and mine—we 
are expending upon our own; next, it is a place of 
pilgrimage for the visitor; its beauty will enhance 
our credit abroad as well as educate our children at 
home. 

As was said in the last chapter, beauty is a tre- 
mendous commercial asset; yet when the ground and 
the stone and the steel have been paid for with mil- 
lions, and the architect goes to the building commis- 
sioners for money, for his ornament, his sculpture, and 


COMMISSIONER AND ARCHITECT 47 


painting, and mosaic, and glass, how do they reply to 
him? He says: “To make this room as beautiful as 
I desire I must have twenty-five thousand dollars.” 
They answer: “If you ask for such a sum as that, 
the legislature will not listen to you for a moment; 
we will propose ten thousand dollars; there has been 
waste in many directions; if you wish to get anything 
at all you must show them that you intend to prac- 
tise economy—and here is our opportunity to prac- 
tise it since art is a superfluity.”” In other words, 
the architect declares: ‘‘We need a room which 
shall be an example of beauty of the first order.” 
The legislators reply: “Spend half the money, and 
make something as good as you can.” And so the 
enterprise is crippled, and two hundred years later, 
perhaps, the visitor looks indifferently at a char- 
acterless room which might have become famous 
and been instructive through all that lapse of time 
had not the legislature been convinced that art was 
the one superfluity which offered opportunity for 
the cutting down of budgets. 

“Before our cities are beautiful they must be 
clean” is used as a knock-down argument against 
him who asks money for embellishment. And what 
on earth has that to do with the question? Of course, 
our. cities should be clean. What is there in clean- 
ness that interferes with beauty, and why should 
the money which pays for cleaning be taken from 
that which pays for ornamenting? As well say: a 


48 HARMONY BETWEEN BUILDING 


man should be honest before he is cultivated. Is 
culture any hindrance to honesty, and may a man not 
spend some money upon his intellectual cravings 
without picking his neighbor’s pocket? 

Enough is given for tawdry so-called ornament to 
pay for much real beauty, and upon this kind of 
ornament the average voter is apt to insist. With- 
out it, he declares that the room looks bare and lacks 
the suggestion of comfort to which he is accustomed 
and entitled. But if you say to him, pay a man to 
think, to so formulate and distribute the ornament 
that it shall create beauty of a high order, the “prac- 
tical” man objects: ‘You wish me to pay an 
expert? I have no money left for that; it has all 
gone to the experts whom we had to have, the men 
who laid our pipes and attended to our needs,” and 
there is the whole argument begun again ab ovo. 
We need an expert to regulate an arrangement which 
enables us, for instance, to accomplish some par- 
ticular business act in ten minutes instead of fifteen, 
but we do not need the beauty which has made the 
joy of centuries of past times. ‘‘Pay me fifty thou- 
sand dollars,” says one man, “‘and I will contrive an 
improvement in the public service by which your 
advertisements shall reach twice as many people.” 
“You shall have your fifty thousand at once as a 
public benefactor.” ‘Give me fifty thousand dol- 
lars,’ says the architect, “and I will make your 
room beautiful.” “Visionary!” replies the legislator; 


From a photograph, copyright 1908, by Detrott Publishing Co. 


Joun W. ALExanper: “The Crowning of Pittsburg.” The main panei 
in the Apotheosis of Pittsburg, Carnegie Institute 


2 . P - < - : . * 


COMMISSIONER AND ARCHITECT 49 


*‘can you not understand that this is the moment for 
economy?” And cannot the legislator understand 
that if we follow such reasoning, public art must be 
abolished, since there is and can be no end to the 
possibility of expenditure upon practical improve- 
ments? In the past the service of beauty was the 
service of God; have we progressed so far that the 
service of beauty is now the robbery of man? One 
would think so. 

The tendency of the average modern individual 
is to assume the following attitude toward art: Art 
is a word applicable to things produced in the past, 
many of which exist still as purchasable commodities. 
If a man is rich enough he will do well to buy them. 
Their possession confers prestige. Indeed, some of 
them now command such enormous prices that to 
own one is almost as creditable as having a patent 
of nobility, and makes a man the successful rival of 
any of his fellows. He may, as it were, wear a sur- 
- passing Rembrandt in his collection, just as a woman 
outvies her friends in her own pearls and laces. If 
he be truly public-spirited he will put some of this 
art of the past upon show, will in a way lay it on the 
shelf of a museum, label and give it to the common- 
wealth. 

Do not believe for a moment that I am speaking 
lightly of the collector; those collectors, who think 
and plan for our museums as well as for their private 
galleries, are our great and lasting benefactors, and I 


so HARMONY BETWEEN BUILDING 


believe that they in turn get some of their truest 
happiness from their art treasures. And it is small 
wonder that they should; for my part I can hardly 
imagine a keener pleasure than that of going into 
one’s own sanctum, and there before one’s own pos- 
session, looking into the clear exquisite depths of a 
panel painted by a great Flemish primitive master 
or some other work perfect of its kind. If I could 
own it I would wear such a possession in my cap, 
and in my heart at once, and would go down on my 
knees before it in thanks to the goddess Fortune. 
Yes, the great collector is not only a benefactor but 
a happy man; and even the perfunctory collector 
who buys because it is the thing to do so, is perhaps 
by way (as the English put it) of becoming happy, 
for in time his pictures lure him onward to more 
and better appreciation. Said an American frend 
twenty years ago in Florence: “It doesn’t do to 
look too much at these old Botticellis and Filippo 
Lippis, for if you do, don’t you know, you get to 
like them.” 

And so it is not of the real collector that I speak, 
but of the average man who has not yet looked “too 
much at the old Botticellis,” but enjoys his art vi- 
cariously and buys upon somebody else’s appraisal. 
When he is made building commissioner, how- 
ever, for the court or State house, being a good 
citizen and conscientious according to his lights, he 
remembers that art is a big word, and he takes cer- 


COMMISSIONER AND ARCHITECT = 51 


tain respectful precautions. These go as far as 
having Mr. Blank, who is “‘artistic in his tastes,” 
made a member of the commission; sometimes they 
go even further—so far, indeed, as to let a little con- 
sideration for beauty fall upon the proceedings 
wherever it may not cost too much or interfere with 
the realities of life and “the necessities of the situ- 
ation.” 

And here I must apologize to the building com- 
missioner, and state his side of the case. I am speak- 
ing of him now in his beginnings. He is confronted 
with something wholly new to him, and he under- 
estimates it; but he is an intelligent man, and as the 
enterprise grows he grows with it. The power of 
such a situation for teaching is great, and I know of 
no more interesting process of education than that of 
the building commissioners of the Capitol in a certain 
great Western State. They began with doubt and 
suspicion, but, led by tact and wisdom on the part of 
their architect, and supported by their own intel- 
ligence and sincerity, they ended in enthusiastic 
realization of success deserved and achieved. I 
believe that their path is being followed by other 
commissioners, and usually much in the measure of 
the importance and therefore of the steadying effect 
of the enterprise. 

We have, then, as our situation for discussion, the 
need in a special case for the creation of a fine public 
building. For material which is to bring about an 


52 HARMONY BETWEEN BUILDING 


adequate meeting of the need, we have on one side 
the architect, sculptor, and painter, who may become 
the direct makers of the monument; on the other 
side, the public, for which the work is to be done; and 
as representing the public we have the building com- 
missioners, who are to initiate the undertaking, 
choose the creative body, make provision for the 
enterprise, and finally approve it. The architect, 
sculptor, and painter are naturally eager and en- 
thusiastic; also they are specially trained, and their 
attention is focalized first of all upon endowing the 
building with beauty of an appropriate character, 
although the architect will also control a staff of 
men expert as to practical needs. The building 
commissioners, too, are eager and enthusiastic; they 
are not specially trained as regards art, but their 
general experience is great, and it will naturally 
incline them in the direction of the practical side. 

This is quite as it should be up to a certain point, 
but it is just beyond that point that the artist’s 
trouble begins. The building commissioner knows 
much of the practical, little of the artistic, side. He 
should, therefore, study especially, and allow par- 
ticularly for, the questions regarding which he is 
relatively ignorant. But usually the exact reverse 
obtains. He has under him artist experts and prac- 
tical experts: on one side the men who control the 
scale, proportion, form, and color; on the other, 
those who plan the lighting, heating, plumbing, etc. 


COMMISSIONER AND ARCHITECT 53 


With the latter the building commissioner works 
sympathetically and understandingly, but when he 
comes to the artists, he selects the best men he knows 
of, and then with the honestest purpose sets them 
adrift. You say: “But is not this ideal—to be let 
alone with your thoughts?” The reply is: ‘‘It 
would be, if the embodiment of thoughts in stone 
and marble and color didn’t have to be paid for. 
The building commissioner is by no means ungener- 
ous, and he means to be just; but when he comes to 
the question of details in appropriations for art he 
is puzzled.” 

The elasticity of his estimates is a stock subject 
for joking between the artist and his client—by 
artist, | mean architect, painter, or sculptor. But 
this elasticity is inevitable unless the artist begins 
by overcharging his client sufficiently to leave him- 
self a margin for unsuccessful experiment, for the 
artist’s experiments are all made in process of the 
work, whereas the manufacturer’s are concluded 
before the goods are ordered of him. You shrug your 
shoulders. I could prove my point to you a hundred 
times during the decoration of a great building, and 
I hope to convince you in a measure in the course of 
these chapters. 

The building commissioner thoroughly under- 
stands the man who puts in the wires or the lighting, 
but the artist and he speak different languages. If 
he orders the tiling for a floor, the manufacturer, 


s4 HARMONY BETWEEN BUILDING 


after measuring the space, can tell him to a dollar 
what the material and the work will cost; but if it 
is a question of the coloring and general decoration 
of the walls and ceiling of the same room, and the 
best possible result is required, no human being can 
say just what it should cost, because this is a matter 
of feeling which may require repeated experiment. 
When McKim was decorating the University Club 
in New York, he did certain pieces of work over 
many times until the result satisfied him. McKim, 
besides being a great artist, had the resources of a 
long-established house behind him, but the young 
artist whose purse is not deep must curtail his experi- 
ment or suffer loss; and the client, unless he be a 
man of quite exceptional breadth of vision, will sus- 
pect what he cannot understand, and will watch the 
budget jealously. Sometimes, truly, the converse 
obtains, and the architect for artistic reasons wishes 
to use a cheaper marble than that proposed by the 
commissioners. This has happened more than once, 
and not a little to the surprise of the parties of the 
first part. 

The members of our local committees and of our 
national committees are sincere—not a doubt of it 
—and the local patriotism which says, give us for 
our public building the local marble—our marble— 
as a sentiment is irreproachable; but if that marble 
once placed clashes with its surroundings and spoils 
the architect’s music, not all the patriotism in 


HAPPINESS 


Hueco Bauuin: Centre ceiling panel in a room of the State Capitol, 
Madison, Wis. 


COMMISSIONER AND ARCHITECT 55 


county, State or nation will completely deaden 
the shock which its presence brings in a dissonance 
of color to the trained eye, because that shock 
proceeds from the cultivation of another kind of 
sense, and arises, not only from feeling, but from 
knowledge—knowledge which it is the expert pro- 
fessional’s business to use as a sword to parry the 
assault of the enthusiastic, if mistaken, local patriot. 
Or, if the contrary obtains, as I believe it does more 
often, if the exotic appeal of the white marble of 
Carrara, or the glitter of Algerian onyx, with its 
prestige of greater cost, moves even a taxpayers’ 
committee, then from no one can come more grace- 
fully than from the experts the suggestion, “Are not 
Abana and Pharpar waters of Damascus?’’—the pa- 
triotic admonition to take for the public building 
the perhaps more harmonious marble which lies in 
the vein under the soil at that same public building’s 
very foundations. 

I wish I could bring this constant need of expert 
advice home to the intelligent, for in most cases it 
does not really reach them. They answer: “Yes, 
yes, you are right; united effort, wisely directed, 
is essential to harmony. You shall have a free hand.” 
They say this and believe it. They are perfectly 
sincere, but the building rises, the reliefs and statues 
begin to take their place; mosaic and painted dec- 
oration begin to cover the walls. All at once some 
one, not an artist, has an idea—it may be a very 


s6 HARMONY BETWEEN BUILDING 


good idea, and assuredly sincere in its conception: 
“For utilitarian reasons we must enlarge such a 
room; for reasons of local patriotism we must 
change our columns or pilasters to a marble of quite 
another color (a color never contemplated by the 
designer); we desire to illustrate some point of local 
pride and the mural painter must introduce into 
his carefully composed arrangement this new thing.” 
Straightway the building as an zsthetic concep- 
tion totters, as it were, upon its base, and, unless you 
have authoritative dicta from the men who know, 
the men of new ideas will so prevail with the public 
that the beauty of the result will be seriously im- 
paired, if not destroyed. 

And after this beauty has been impaired, the public 
says: “‘Why did they bungle? They had an advisory 
committee of artists, who ought to have known 
better.” But an advisory committee can only advise. 
It has no other power, and the rejection of advice 
upon one point may throw all the other parts out of 
harmony. It is true that afterthoughts must come, 
and must be acted upon in some way in all great 
enterprises. But the business of the building com- 
mission is to minimize at the start the number and 
importance of possible afterthoughts, and later to 
deal with them wisely. 

In the first instance, lay directors and artist di- 
rectors may confer with infinite advantage; in the 
second, wise interference is hardly possible save to 


COMMISSIONER AND ARCHITECT 57 


the professional artist. The lay director can always 
make it clear to the artist director that there must 
be seating room, say, for two hundred and fifty more 
people; that is a simple proposition, plain to any 
intelligent man. But the artist cannot always make 
it clear to the lay director why in enlarging the room 
he must do such and such a thing not to impair its 
beauty, cannot make the reason quite clear because 
it can be quite clear only to him who is trained in 
zsthetic relation and requirement. 

Utilitarian requirements can, barring accident, be 
foreseen and planned on paper at the inception of 
the work to the satisfaction of the lay directors; 
requirements in the processes of scaling, coloring, 
modelling, cannot be wholly foreseen, but to a cer- 
tain extent must be felt as they grow. Many a non- 
professional critic comes forward with a suggestion, 
excellent in itself, but utterly impossible of realiza- 
tion. Sometimes the thing suggested is better than 
the thing executed, but cannot be adopted. The 
theme may be even noble, yet ridiculous in possibil- 
ity of juxtaposition. When Paul Veronese painted 
one of those great banquets, which are among his 
masterpieces, and in which was a figure of Christ 
sitting at meat with many people, he put a dog 
under the table, as was his frequent habit. One of 
his building committee thought a dog not good 
enough for the subject, and requested the artist to 
put in St. Mary Magdalen in its place, washing 


<8 HARMONY BETWEEN BUILDING 


the Christ’s feet. The painter replied that there 
were compositional reasons which made it incon- 
venient to do so. We have no mural painters to-day 
in America as authoritative as Paul Veronese, and 
usually our building committees treat us very con- 
siderately, but embarrassing suggestions have been 
sometimes made. 

In a way we have been generous even to lavish- 
ness, and at times we have spent money that might 
almost have built the Parthenon or Notre Dame of 
Paris. The evident reply is: ‘‘Yes, but this is not 
the age of Pericles, or of the medizval masons’ 
guilds; where should we look for an Ictinus or 
Phidias, or an Erwin von Steinbach?” The re- 
joinder is as evident: Pericles simply did the best 
he could in his time. His time happened to be one 
of the great epochs of art, but that has nothing to 
do with the principle. He put his enterprise into 
the best-trained hands that he could find, and gave 
to the ablest brain the conduct of that enterprise. 
With the designers and builders he associated him- 
self, perhaps the most enlightened amateur of all 
time, but we may believe that he let discussion of 
important points come from the mouths of archi- 
tect, painter, and sculptor, before decision came from 
his own. | 

For it is by no means the wish of the reasonable 
artist to-day to disfranchise the enlightened amateur. 
The enlightened amateur is invaluable; he helps to 


COMMISSIONER AND ARCHITECT 59 


clear up darkness in council; in a way his all-round 
cultivation may bring a wider sense of perfection 
than comes to the professional man. His love of all 
kinds of art may permeate discussion and consider 
many sides of a question, where the technician, 
forced to concentrate himself upon a point, may over- 
look other points of interest because they are with- 
out his focus. The non-professional may map out 
the course, he may even direct it in a general way, 
but at crucial times, at moments of emergency, 
safety will be more assured if the non-professional 
man keeps his hand off the wheel. 


IT 


I have tried to note some of the difficulties which, 
even with the utmost good-will on both sides, may 
arise between the building commissioner and the 
artist in control of an enterprise, be he architect, 
mural painter, or sculptor. Let us pass on to the 
question of harmony between these three latter 
creators of the building, and begin by considering 
the importance of the artist-architect as director 
and controller. 

If the great decorated building is such a mighty 
agent, if all civilized peoples have needed it, and pro- 
duced it, we too need and must create it. We have 
created it, and we are acquiring it yearly in more 
and more of our cities. Do we ever reflect much 


60 HARMONY BETWEEN BUILDING 


concerning such a creation? It is worth while, for 
the process may be illuminating. How has it begun? © 

Here in a new country, the sittings of the court of 
law have been held first under a tree. Then the 
school coeval with the church has been built—built 
perhaps before the court-house because the babies at 
a task of any kind need shelter more than the hardier 
“grown-ups.” Next have come court and town 
meeting-house; then, as they wax numerous and — 
prosperous, these children of older countries remem- 
ber what their ancestors built across seas, and ask 
for something more enduring than pine planks and 
shingles, until at last those who would still keep the 
public purse-strings drawn are outvoted, and an 
appropriation of money is made. Here are the 
funds for the new State capitol. Now who shall 
build it? A knows a good man, and proposes him; 
so does B; so does C. But the other citizens say 
no, and the local papers say no still more emphatic- 
ally. ‘‘We wish to offer the very widest opportu- 
nity for talent. There shall be no ‘mute, inglorious 
Milton’ here; if we have one, let him speak out in 
stone and mortar. Other States have built great 
capitols, ours must be as fine as any. We will have a 
competition.” 

There is abundant fallacy in their contention 
that a competition necessarily offers the widest op- 
portunity for talent, but the theory is democratic, 
and, after much discussion by those who are as nearly 


Copyright by Robert Blum 


Rosert Bium: Decoration in Mendelssohn Hall Glee Club, 
New York. Fragment 


One of the pioneer mural paintings which helped importantly to further the movement 


NS 


COMMISSIONER AND ARCHITECT 61 


expert as practice can make them, no perfectly satis- 
factory equivalent for competition has yet been 
found. 

This question of competitions is so important, so 
full of thorns, so far from having been solved, that 
a good deal of space must be given to even partial 
consideration of it. 


IIT 


The selection of the men who are to create the 
building, the architect who is to design it, the sculp- 
tors and painters who are to be responsible for its 
decoration, is evidently a matter of grave importance 
to the public. 

The discussion of the method of selection is not 
likely to be entertaining to the reader, but the 
double facts—first, that what we call an open com- 
petition is the method usually preferred by the public 
and its representatives; secondly, that the artists 
nearly always dislike and disapprove of this method, 
make it desirable to state some of the conditions 
inseparable from an open competition, which render 
selection by the latter uncertain of result. In noting 
some of these difficulties, I emphasize especially 
those which confront the mural painter, because 
his specialty and needs are most familiar to me, 
but very nearly the same conditions apply to com- 
petition in architecture or sculpture. 


62 HARMONY BETWEEN BUILDING 


The mainspring of the public desire for competi- 
tion is the public wish for the best service, and the 
public belief (I think mistaken) that young and un- 
discovered talent will find its direct opportunity in 
open competition. 

To put it more familiarly, ches average layman says 
to himself, John Smith, of So-and-So; John Brown, 
of So-and-So, seem to us talented. How do we know 
that they are not more talented than any one in the 
field? On the other hand, how are they to show their 
talent save in an open competition? What oppor- 
tunity is there for them if the important commissions 
in mural painting are given always to older men? 
Establish an open competition; John Smith and 
John Brown will gravitate to their proper places, 
and, finding their opportunity, two geniuses may 
manifest themselves. 

It is possible to show that the event might prove, 
first, that John Smith and John Brown would not 
gravitate to their true places, and, secondly, by 
reason of certain conditions which govern competi- 
tion, that they might succeed in obtaining the com- 
mission, and fail in its execution. 

The two main hindrances to a successful deter- 
mination by open competition are, first, unfitness of 
new material—by new material I mean artists who 
have not had practical experience in mural painting; 
secondly, unfitness of juries. These two unfitnesses 
react upon each other. Let us begin, for convenience 


COMMISSIONER AND ARCHITECT 63 


sake, because it is sooner discussed, by considering 
the second of these two objections-——unfitness of the 
jury. 

Very nearly the same qualities are requisite in a 
good juror as in a competent executant; therefore 
in an important case it is difficult to strengthen the 
jury without weakening the ranks of the competi- 
tors. We are still so young in mural painting in 
America that we have not a conveniently large num- 
ber of men to choose from for the double service. If 
our mural painting had been long established the 
ideal condition would exist of many artists already 
working on commissions who would be too busy to 
compete, but not too busy to act as jurors. This 
condition will exist here in the future, let us hope in 
the near future, but does not as yet. There would 
probably be some first-rate artists whose absolute 
disapproval of competition would prevent their be- 
coming competitors, but their very disapproval of 
the method would disincline them from being jurors, 
or at best would make them half-hearted. 

In any first-rate artist temperament urges strongly; 
he is bound to lean toward certain kinds of technic, 
and even toward a certain class of subjects. Bias of 
this kind can be neutralized only by the appoint- 
ment of a large jury, and, as stated above, such ap- 
pointment, in its withdrawing of many men from 
possible competition, has distinct disadvantages. 

In any competition some sort of subject has to be 


64 HARMONY BETWEEN BUILDING 


given out, since even its widest scope must be ap- 
propriate to the place which will receive decoration. 
Now nearly every limitation of subject will be help- 
ful to the juror, and make it easier for him to de- 
cide between this and that competitor. On the 
other hand, exactly the contrary will obtain with 
the competitor, since every limit put upon subject 
will, in direct ratio, limit the said competitor’s indi- 
viduality. Here is an almost insuperable obstacle 
to the best result. 

If a single subject is given even in a closed com- 
petition, say of five competitors, it is certain to be 
more sympathetic to some than to others of the five. 
This at once constitutes inequality of opportunity. 
Again, each juror will lean by nature to one kind of 
subject rather than to another, as well as to some 
special kind of treatment—another condition which 
militates against perfect fairness of estimate. If, on 
the contrary, the commission were given by direct 
appointment, the commissioners and the artist would 
agree beforehand upon a subject sympathetic to 
both. Any really intelligent client can immensely 
increase his chance of getting valuable service from 
an architect, sculptor, or painter, by discussing 
his problem with him beforehand, and determining 
through what he learns in that discussion whether 
the temperament of that particular architect, 
sculptor, or painter is sympathetic with his own, 
and thereby likely to interpret his (the client’s) © 


COMMISSIONER AND ARCHITECT 65 


ideals as he would like to have them interpreted. 
But if you have a competition it 1s the competitor’s 
first duty not to discuss his problem with the client 
or with any other competitor. 

He may be ideally fitted to carry out the client’s 
ideals, but he 25 not allowed to find out what they are; 
whereas, in the case of appointment, the client may 
study his artists as much as he likes beforehand, and 
by discussion of his problem with them get a good 
working knowledge of their temperaments, even if 
he cannot estimate their working capacities. 

Now, in a competition two men are often so nearly 
equal that the question of taste and personal wish on 
the part of the client really ought to outweigh the 
perhaps very trifling superiority of one artist over 
the other. But, in accordance with the rules of a 
competition, the jury is rigidly held to give the award 
to the one who is better than the other, be it ever so 
little better, except in the very rare case of the jury 
knowing the client’s temperament and wishes in- 
timately enough to consult his real and ultimate ad- 
vantage, as seen from the broadest point of view. 
From this same broadest point of view commission 
by direct appointment is thus far more practical 
than commission through competition. 

Probably the greatest obstacle to healthy compet- 
ing is the a priori conviction of the artist competitor, 
that the chance is very small of his going before a 
jury which will thoroughly comprehend him through 


66 HARMONY BETWEEN BUILDING 


his sketch—that is to say, comprehend his aim toward 
a final purpose—and his further conviction that unless 
his aim is comprehended the jury could not possibly 
forecast the result which he might obtain in his fin- 
ished work. 

Now, there is a great deal behind a competitive 
sketch. There are some things which cannot be 
divined by anybody except their author, and there 
are some things which deceive even a clever jury, 
which, indeed, at times fool the author himself. It 
is well known to artists of experience that a painter 
may triumph with his sketch, and fall flat with his 
finished work. We have all seen sketches which were 
captivating in appearance, but which depended for 
their attractivenes upon qualities which would 
practically disappear as the work was enlarged. 
Sometimes such promise is obviously tricky, but 
often it is quite honest in the author of the sketch, 
and so subtle as to deceive the jurors and make an 
equitable decision impossible. In sum, men who 
make beautiful sketches sometimes cannot paint a 
good mural panel; while others who can do a large 
and admirable work are clumsy and ineffectual in 
their sketches. Every one of these conditions offers 
an argument against competitions. 

Another argument is this: the carrying power of 
a sketch, considered simply as an impressive en- 
semble, is often, usually indeed, aided by incomplete- 
ness and by breadth of handling. On the other hand, 


COMMISSIONER AND ARCHITECT 67 


the carrying power of a sketch, as an expression of 
finality in the artist’s intentions, is exactly the op- 
posite. The artist’s chance of showing to the jury 
just what he intends will be in proportion to the de- 
gree of elaboration and finish which he accords to 
his sketch. Therefore he will be obliged to choose 
between two kinds of effectiveness, either one of 
which conflicts with the other. 

Again, psychological operation makes it almost 
impossible to a man to plan as convincingly upon an 
uncertainty as he would in the case of a decoration 
which he had received outright as a commission, and 
was, therefore, sure eventually to correct and per- 
fect upon and from his first plan. In the former case, 
he has to complicate what he would like to do by 
what he thinks the jury would like to have him do, 
and the complication, sure to disturb, is apt also to 
weaken. 

Again, it is open to question whether the moral 
effect of competitions is not unfortunate. Several 
men lose where one wins, and each loser is apt to 
feel with justice that he has not had a really free 
hand. That some of the strongest natures are stim- 
ulated by failure to greater endeavor is probable, 
but in view of their doubt as to the real equality of 
opportunity, most of the losers are disheartened; 
their morale is lowered. The public may answer 
that the artist is here subject to the common lot 
and that competition is a stimulus and is the soul 


68 HARMONY BETWEEN BUILDING 


of business. To this the rejoinder is that art is a 
business only in a secondary sense; in the first 
sense it is art. 7 

Again, business competition is practically con- 
tinuous, unlimited by time, or at any rate limited 
only by result. A man who is making typewriters 
or automobiles may spend any amount of time on 
inventing improvements before he competes, and 
when he does compete, it is with a completed article, 
and he wins by a carefully planned and executed 
result. The artist in a competition can offer only a 
sketch which is but experimental, and the jury’s 
dictum stands between 7¢ and result. 

In a strictly limited competition open only to ex- 
perts, who are paid for their sketches, some of the 
conditions stated in the foregoing paragraphs may be 
met, and others improved, but a limited competition 
at once throws out of court the public’s first and most 
convinced contention that competition opens the 
widest opportunity to undiscovered talent. 

Another objection to competition, limited or un- 
limited, is its enormous expense. In an architectural 
competition, the many thousands of dollars expended 
upon the competitive drawings in various archi- 
tectural offices are sometimes so out of proportion 
to any obtainable return that on the next occasion 
some of the most promising candidates decide to 
stay out altogether. In the specific case of a com- 
petition recently held, one of our most experi- 


b) 


Georce W. Breck: “ Reflection.’ 
of the residence of the late Whitelaw Reid 


One of the ceiling panels in the library 


: 
: 
: 
: 


ie Pee 


te 


a Wide ey sae: 


COMMISSIONER AND ARCHITECT & 


enced architects calculated the money spent by the 
competing firms upon their drawings, and found 
that it amounted to more than the commission 
eventually paid to the winning competitor. In 
every case of an unpaid competition the public ob- 
tains something for nothing. In this case it received 
in cost of effort far more than seems just. Trouble- 
some conditions of the kind I have mentioned do 
not come to the notice of the public, which, on the 
contrary, is easily caught by the specious semblance 
of equal opportunity. 

Of course, there are two sides; the undiscovered 
genius may appear, but it is unlikely, and it would 
seem in the light of experience hitherto gathered that 
the nearer the open competition is kept to the school- 
room and the further from the great public enter- 
prise the better. And this brings us to the strong- 
est argument of all. New and untried talent should 
not be intrusted with the conduct of a great enter- 
prise. For the latter, experience is required. Young 
Napoleons and Alexanders come but once in a 
thousand years; a young pilot would hardly be 
given a Mauretania to take into harbor on his first 
trip; the most brilliant young captain would scarcely 
command a division before he had taken any part 
in its manoeuvres as a subordinate. To assume con- 
trol of the decoration of a vast room is to embark 
upon a great enterprise; young and untried talent 
may find place in its conduct and may eventually 


70 HARMONY BETWEEN BUILDING 


pass onward and upward to its direction, but to base 
the selection of the director upon the most brilliant 
sketch of a beginner would be to take unjustifiable 
risks with the public support and the public money. 
And by a beginner I mean any one who has not 
already taken an important subordinate part in the 
control of a decoration, and taken it successfully. © 

It would be unfair to dismiss this side of the sub- 
ject without admitting that commission by direct 
appointment may open the door to one abuse worse 
than any which has crept into open competition. I 
refer to lobbying. 

Lobbying, of course, might result in putting for- 
ward the right man, but also it might, through fa- 
voritism, make an utterly unworthy appointment, 
and it cannot be too carefully guarded against. For 
the less worthy an artist, the less likely he is to reply, 
as did Paolo Veronese to the Venetian senator who 
advised him to enter a competition: “I believe that 
I am fitter to merit commissions than to solicit 
them.” Inthe great age of Italian art competitions 
do not seem to have been especially successful, else 
Vasari would have noted more than the few which he 
describes; and an army of pilgrims may thank their 
stars to-day that Pope Julius’s way of instituting 
a “competition” was to give one series of walls to 
Raphael, another to Michelangelo, instead of ask- 
ing them to submit competitive sketches to a jury 
composed, we will say, of himself and Giovanni de’ 


COMMISSIONER AND ARCHITECT 71 


Medici, with Bramante and Giuliano da San Gallo 
to help them out on technical points. 

On the whole, commission by appointment ap- 
pears to be safer than a result obtainable by open 
competition, and the answer to the public’s main 
contention would seem to be this: John Smith, 
brilliantly talented and inexperienced, is debarred by 
his inexperience from appointment to a headship, 
but is fitted by his talent to be appointed to a minor 
place in which place his talent will earn for him ex- 
perience and assure his future. 


IV 


Let us suppose, then, that a competition is ordered, 
and architects’ offices begin to buzz, and thousands 
of dollars’ worth of time is put into drawings, most 
of which might be carried out in excellent buildings, 
yet most of which must perforce go unrewarded by 
the final great success. The jury meets and exhibits 
its strength and its weakness, the decision is made 
—enter the architect. Let us say at once that 
America, which is productive of ability, has been very 
successful in this particular product of a man who 
must be artist and engineer, imaginative and prac- 
tical. 

And think what a task lies before him. This great 
building is to be the temple of the Deity; that one 
is to stand for the law, and must not only shelter 


72 HARMONY BETWEEN BUILDING | 


him who pleads, but by its character suggest the 
majesty of justice which it enshrines. Or it is to be 
a library which stores up cubic measure of printed 
wisdom, and should manifest in its appearance its 
appropriateness to such guardianship; or a town hall, 
which shall suggest the aspirations and picture the 
achievements of acommunity. The muse rightly in- 
voked eternalizes the souvenirs of man, but those 
two words—“‘rightly invoked ”’—infer so much. That 
art is long, he who sits before only a little panel or 
statuette can realize; how much more he who sets 
his hand to the construction of a great and compli- 
cated building! 

Think of the whole that must be conceived as a 
whole; the parts that must be subordinated—their 
infinite and infinitely subtile interrelations, their 
‘sizes, proportions, shapes, colors, surfaces, the na- 
ture of their material, the character of their appear- 
ance, simple or complicated, austere or rich! What 
employment is here, what exaction! If we drop a 
pin into a delicate mechanism the disturbance may 
be felt by even ponderous wheels which that deli- 
cacy has served and governed at once. Anybody 
can understand this because anybody can see the 
disturbance that results. In a great building a small 
artistic mistake may also be far-reaching in its dis- 
turbance of general harmony, but this time it is 
not by any means every one who can realize it at 
first, because it is not so patent, and only such eyes 


COMMISSIONER AND ARCHITECT 73 


note it as are either prompted by feeling or informed 
by training. But the small mistake, if unnoted, can 
go on with its mischief until a big dissonance re- 
sults, and you have a regular “house that Jack 
built” of successive mischances, all started by one 
little disagreement when the “‘dog began to worry 
the cat,’ with bad forms upon good proportions or 
something of the sort. 

All this the architect must foresee, or rectify, or 


suffer for. Therefore he must be armed at every 


point; he must be a gladiator and fight the opinion 
of big and little where it is hurtful, and he must 
have a moral consciousness that can soar like an 
aeroplane above considerations of gain. He must, 
for example, reject in favor of cheaper material the 
costlier marble which would swell his commission, 
but might hurt his artistic effect. He must be 
modern and meet the modern problem, and in so 
doing turn his back resolutely upon some of the 
effects which he has most loved and most studied 
in buildings of the past, effects upon which he has 
been brought up to the comfort of his eyes and 
mind. He may not consider first of all the propor- 
tions which he would like to have. He may not 
spread out his plan, for he is building on ground 
more precious than gold, and he must squeeze his 
house, and press it together, and shoot it straight up 
into the air. Two feet of recess may cost thousands; 
two feet of projection may entail a lawsuit and 


74 HARMONY BETWEEN BUILDING 


condemnation. He may not treat his facade with 
beautiful constructive ornament, but, instead, must 
make it into a kind of colander for the sifting of 
light into every cranny of a thousand office rooms, 
and in considering these same rooms he must unite 
something of the knowledge of a fireman, a purveyor 
of fresh air, and even of a sanitary inspector. 

For this great building is to be useful, expressive, 
and beautiful all at once. The people have paid their 
money for this. What responsibility then weighs 
upon the architect! How truly can he be called 
creator, how fortunate if one day he may be able to 
look upon his work and see that it is good! How 
manifold must be his precautions! How almost in- 
finite are the calls made upon his knowledge! How 
prodigious is the scope for his imagination! He must 
wear wings, yet grope in subcellars. He must have 
eyes for the glories of paradise painted under his 
dome, and at the same time to detect a leak in its 
lining. He must appreciate the excellence of the 
figures drawn upon his plaster and know that 
plaster’s chemistry and endurance. Endurance of 
his own he must have, too, and the patience of Job 
with the walking delegate of the strikers. 

And at the very beginning of things, if he wishes 
decorative beauty in his building he must become a 
missionary and a preacher. He is designing a town 
hall or State capitol. Now, beauty is expensive; it 
costs money; and upon the committee which makes 


(Ainjua9 YiUs9e}XIS Ajiv9) SOUBSSIVUDR [[NJ 94 Jo IouUvUI 94} Ul SOUT] PU SOSseUT JO soured fo a[durex iy 
“UU “PUOUTAA “ATeIQIy] siqng ey} Ul UONvIOIIg = ,,*BuIUIvar] Jo 1YSI'] OYL,,, :XOD NOANTY 


0D uohuay 69 14.774hd07 


testis 


S3AN} SSLENSUS ALLO TIVO” 
CC 


f ‘ 
7 
ry 
i ’ 
’ * _ 
. ‘ 
2 Eh ‘ 7 xn 


COMMISSIONER AND ARCHITECT 75 


up the architect’s building commission are sure to be 
men with veto power, who feel that their first duty 
in committee is to prevent unnecessary expenditure 
of the people’s money, and who as honestly believe 
that beauty 75 unnecessary. To these men the archi- 
tect goes cautiously, respecting at once their power 
and their undoubted sincerity, which may cost his 
_ building its esthetic life. 

The committeeman begins by believing that if 
the transaction of business is sheltered nothing more 
is needed. Gradually he admits the possibility of a 
few columns which not only “look nice” but hold up 
something. Soon, too, he realizes the attractive- 
ness of rich marble, though he scents “‘graft’’ in its 
employment and examines into the thing carefully. 
When the architect attempts to show him that in 
certain cases a cheap material can be handsomer 
than a costly one he looks askance at his teacher 
and suspects him of hedging in some way and for 
some purpose. But his education goes on. The 
average member of a building committee is a good 
man, selected for very real qualities, and, though he 
may not have much knowledge of art, he has plenty 
of knowledge of other things. 

By the time that the State capitol is finished the 
recalcitrant committeeman is often in love with the 
building from dome to pavement, and proud of the 
hand he has had in it; and the final relations between 
architects and their committees usually do the high- 


76 COMMISSIONER AND ARCHITECT 


est honor to both sides, and lead by reason of their 
success to even more important enterprises. His- 
torians of art have celebrated the many-sidedness 
of the Renaissance architects who could build domes 
and paint miniatures, play the lute and write son- 
nets, carve intagli and colossi; but even of them we 
may believe were hardly exacted more kinds of 
knowledge than are asked of the modern architect. 

“Are you a man or a meeracle ?” says the sergeant 
to Kipling’s Mulvaney in “‘My Lord the Elephant.” 
“Betwixt and betune,” replied Mulvaney. And so 
to me the architect has sometimes seemed betwixt 
and between a man and a miracle in his capacity 
for all-round knowledge. | 


— 


or fz) | : * 2 
Ly 
: a | 
Z 
— 
d be ; 
| S 0 
aoe ae | 
aah 
: ~Z 
ee 
ie a | 
ce ea oe 
x Ks | = 
aie : or Ye © = : 


aso 


III 


IMPORTANCE OF EXPERIENCE IN THE 
MURAL PAINTER 


I 


WE have discussed the importance of decoration 
as a factor in civilization and the importance of 
harmony between the building commissioner who 
orders and pays for the decoration and the archi- 
tect who designs and directs it. Under this second 
division we have placed the subdivisions which re- 
late to the importance of the architect as an artist, 
and the importance of the selection of the execu- 
tants. We have now to take up the various sub- 
divisions of the importance of the mural painter’s 
harmony with the building commissioner, with the 
architect, and with his fellow mural painters. 

Before all this and as directly akin to the last words 
of the preceding chapter, we may consider the im- 
portance of experience in the mural painter, not for- 
getting that architecture and sculpture are closely 
related to painting, and that what is needed and re- 
quired in the practitioner of one of the three branches 
is indispensable in the followers of the other two. 

79 


80 IMPORTANCE OF EXPERIENCE 


Experience, so absolutely necessary to the archi- 
tect in control, is almost equally essential to the 
mural painter. If charity covers a multitude of 
sins, art covers and emboldens a deal of ignorance 
—the would-be practice or appreciation of art, that 
is. In the estimation of the general, art is by no 
means caviare, but something which they may par- 
take of freely and assimilate by grace of nature; 
to many of them, in fact, art is universal license. 

If their friend is dangerously ill they will not 
send a violinist or a painter to him, even if that 
violinist or painter has occasionally listened to a 
lecture upon a medical subject; but if the question 
is one relating to art they will cheerfully set some 
smatterer in the field merely because he is a personal 
acquaintance whom they desire to advance. If you 
take them to task, they say: “Yes, but in a case of 
dangerous illness it is a question of the life of a man.” 
We answer: “‘And where art is concerned it is some- 
times, as in the case of the Campanile of Venice, for 
instance, a question of a valuable life which lasted 
a thousand years, then ended for lack of an artist’s 
supervision.” 

Tell them to start on a railway journey with an 
inexperienced person at the locomotive’s throttle, to 
enter a rocky channel with a green hand at the helm, 
they would search your eyes for dementia incipiens; 
but ask them to embark an inexperienced person 
upon a long and exacting artistic enterprise among 


IN THE MURAL PAINTER 81 


rocks and shallows of all sorts of unapprehended 
difficulties, and they will say: “‘Why not?” 

If they buy even a bulldog they will send an 
expert to select a prize-winner for them; but if it 
is a matter of art—! He who approaches the sym- 
bolical goddesses who stand for chemistry or physics 
draws near with respect. He admits that to succeed 
with them a man must know; but before the goddess 
of the arts the average man is a chartered libertine; 
“he may chuck her under the chin and sit on her 
knee.” 

You tell me perhaps: “We are tired of hearing the 
professional find fault with the public.”’ Let me say 
at once that I am one of those who believe first and 
last in the public. It is for it that art in the end 
exists. I believe in the lay critic, the lay writer; 
above all, the lay appreciator, the men and women 
who make up the world-audience. I believe in them 
first and last, but not all the time. There are times 
when they err in indulgence or in severity, and when 
it becomes necessary for the artists to demand that 
the rules be observed, if needful to stand together 
like soldiers in a hollow square and fight for this 
observance. 

A famous business man once said to me: “The 
trouble with American artists 1s exactly the same as 
with American business men. They don’t work 
hard enough.” The application of his proposition 
to the business man surprised me; in the case of the 


82. IMPORTANCE OF EXPERIENCE 


artist it may be that he sometimes does not work 
hard enough, but it is certain that where the matter 
in hand is some great decorative undertaking the 
public often does not permit him to think hard and 
long enough—to prove his thought by sufficient ex- 
periment. 

_ As we have said, one of the first of the sine-qua- 
nons in the successful decoration of a great public 
building is that experience plus talent shall conduct 
the enterprise. And here again the client, which in 
this case is the public, accepts our admonition with 
an “of course, of course”—then shows lack of com- 
prehension by proceeding somewhat as follows: A 
great court-house in the capital of the State of Cloud- 
land is to be built. Some one suggests that A and 
B and C, experienced mural painters in—say, New 
York, or Philadelphia, or Chicago—be consulted, 
and that one of them be chosen to direct the work. 
Straightway somebody else cries: “No! We must 
have a Cloudland man to do Cloudland work. John 
Smith, born in Cloudland, is full of talent; he spent 
four years at the Atelier Tel-et-Tel in Paris, and has 
had a medal at the Salon.” So John Smith, of 
Cloudland, is given the direction of the work. 

Now, nothing can be more praiseworthy or more 
natural than the feeling which prompts such action 
on the part of the building commissioners for the 
court-house. They are sincere, earnest, patriotic, 
and they wish to give the local man an opportu- 


aljvoyy, oosejag ‘AvmJieys Aq 
\{[@M Joy uoNeIosIqd , Wy Meweig Jo soynqiuiy oy, :dSIyD AnHLAYy6 


IN THE MURAL PAINTER 83 


nity. Nevertheless there are many chances that they 
will be mistaken in their action. 

There is a deal of artistic talent all over the coun- 
try, a deal of it in Cloudland, presumably a deal of 
it in John Smith. But there is very little special 
experience in the country, and such experience is 
absolutely essential to the successful conduct of so 
exacting an undertaking as is the decoration of a 
public building; for decoration, which is a great 
branch of art, happens also to be a science—or at 
least to have one foot based upon it—and science is 
exact knowledge, the fruit of experience and only 
of experience. 

It is right that John Smith should be granted the 
privilege conferred by his nativity and backed by 
his talent. It is right that the young men, young in 
experience, that is—I do not care how few or how 
many years they may have lived—tright, I say, that 
these young men, if they have shown ability and char- 
acter, should be recompensed for the same, should 
be given an under-part in the work, and so win ex- 
perience and pass onward and upward to the con- 
trol of later work. 

But the headship of such an enterprise should be 
intrusted only to a man who has already proven his 
capacity as a leader and a controller. Feeling will 
not suffice; knowledge is required. The qualities 
which gave John Smith his medal in the Salon will 
probably be of great help in eventually making him 


8, IMPORTANCE OF EXPERIENCE 


a decorator, but no Pallas Athene of talent can spring 
fully armed from the brain of any atelier whatever, 
be it in Olympus or Paris or New York, new-born, 
and yet ready to assume the direction of a great 
work which demands co-ordination of all sorts based 
upon nothing short of past experience. 

Certainly, every one must agree with the propo- 
sition that the young men should have an oppor- 
tunity. It isin them that lies our only hope of future 
decoration in America. But this does not mean 
that the men who by hard study have learned to 
decorate shall step aside and give their place to those 
who wish to learn. Such a proposition could not be 
reasonably entertained in any business or profession 
or at any time of the earth’s history. If a great 
tower were to be erected, and an architect success- 
fully laid the foundations to it, surely no building 
commission would say: ‘‘Now we will delay the fur- 
ther erection until other and younger architects have 
learned to lay foundations.” If they did, the result 
would be a country full of foundations without any — 
towers upon them. 

And that is in a sense what will happen if we lean 
too much to local patriotism; for in such a case what 
begins as nationalism easily becomes parochialism. 
If the work is to be given to John Smith only because 
he is of Cloudland, this will happen. In each State 
and county the local artist will be preferred; now, 
continued and repeated experience is needed to make 


IN THE MURAL PAINTER 85 


a director of decoration. On the other hand, there 
cannot, save in a few great States, be enough impor- 
tant work to build up with reasonable rapidity and 
fortify such experience as would warrant leadership 
in decoration. Many years would have to elapse 
before the really experienced decorator could be 
developed; the land would be full of half-educated 
artists doing work beyond their capacity instead of 
painting under men who would gradually lead them 
to the top. In the story, the old lady always saved 
the ripe apples till they began to decay, and so finally 
ate them all rotten; we should reverse this system 
and eat all our apples unripe and sour. 

It should be axiomatic that only through repeated 
opportunity can a man become a mural painter, but 
he should not become one through the cession of 
opportunity by men older in experience, but rather 
through the natural and gradual development of more 
general opportunity. This opportunity can arise only 
through popularization, and popularization can be 
produced only by the intrinsic excellence of the work 
shown. It is quite true that a certain popularization 
comes from a spirit of rivalry between different 
localities, and a spirit of imitation, but this is a 
dangerous state of mind based upon artificiality. 
Unless the excellence of the work is sustained it will 
cease to interest; people will find out that, though 
they have kept abreast of their neighbor over the 
way, they do not really care for what they have ob- 


86 IMPORTANCE OF EXPERIENCE 


tained, and then the spirit of imitation will manifest 
itself quite as naturally and rapidly in the abandon- 
ment of decoration as it did in undertaking it. 


IT 


So much then for the statement that experience 
plus talent is absolutely necessary to him who is to 
be given the conduct of an important part in dec- 
oration. A few examples of the puzzles and troubles 
that confront a mural painter who is engaged upon 
an important work are sufficient to demonstrate the 
truth of this statement. 

To begin with, in a great building in course of 
erection, the mural painter or the sculptor has to 
do his thinking under certain physically and materi- 
ally difficult conditions. In Chicago, at the World’s 
Fair, we mural painters wore sweaters, the wind 
blew the turpentine out of our cups and stiffened | 
our fingers; in Washington, under a summer sun 
beating upon the dome of the Library of Congress, 
we worked in gauze underclothing only, and drank 
a bucketful of ice-water a day; in another great 
building, when the steam was turned on in September 
to dry the plastering, one of my assistants became 
very sick, but went bravely on with his painting. 
These are only physical discomforts, but they make 
it hard to do thoughtful work. Something, however, 
that is more than physical goes into trying to com- 


IN THE MURAL PAINTER 87 


pel vast spaces to tell as one piece; into making 
thirty figures scale alike, and scale with the archi- 
tecture too; into considering the amount of air that 
is to come between the decoration and its spectator— 
sometimes ten feet of air, sometimes one hundred 
and fifty; into suiting various portions of your dec- 
oration to the different lighting of different parts of 
the same space; into allowing for the treatment of 
curved surfaces; into conforming your composition 
of masses and lines to the sort of ornament, rich or 
severe, that is to surround it; into neutralizing the 
effect of unfortunate reflections; into realizing that, 
deprived as we are, in mural work, of the resource 
of varnish, only repeated experience teaches what 
our overpaintings may dry into. 

With all of these difficulties to consider and many, 
very many more, which I have no space to note, is it 
hard to accept my affirmation that not talent alone 
but talent backed by experience is absolutely essen- 
tial to him who would direct a great enterprise in 
mural painting? Take a man who is full of ability 
and set this problem before him; for a time he will 
be bewildered, and there are things which nobody 
can tell him; he must find them out for himself. 

One of the most brilliant of American painters, 
Alfred Collins, who was taken away from us only 
too early, and to our great loss, came into the Van- 
derbilt Gallery one day when I was painting there 
on a large decoration. He criticised a certain part 


88 IMPORTANCE OF EXPERIENCE 


of my work. I said: ‘That has been puzzling me, 
too, and I have made repeated changes in that par- 
ticular place. Take my palette, and go up on the 
scaffold, and make the change yourself; suggest what 
you would like to see.” He went up the ladder and 
painted a little while, then came down and viewed 
his work from the floor. ‘Why, it doesn’t look at 
all the same from here as from the scaffold.” “No,” 
I replied, ‘that’s what I’ve been finding out over 
and over again for several years.” He remounted 
the scaffold, returned twice to the floor, then put 
the palette back into my hands and said, laughing: 
**T give it up.” 

A commission for a decoration in a public beiiledste 
had been allotted to Collins. A few weeks later he 
decided to decline it, and told me that he did not 
for the moment feel able to take the time necessary 
to acquire such experience as would enable him to 
handle the work properly. That Collins would have 
made a brilliant decorator could he have taken time 
to grow gradually along the lines of mural work I 
feel sure; that under the circumstances he was wise 
in declining I am almost equally certain. 

The most delightful example which we have of 
simplicity dauntlessly confronting complexity is 
probably that of William Morris and his friends at 
Oxford volunteering an attack upon a stone-vaulted 
ceiling. They were full of subject-matter—which 
latter was to treat of knights and dragons and such— ~ 


AV YIOX MON 
‘UIBITA OY} AIP], “IG JO YOINYD oY? UI UONvIODap 9y1 Jo weg =, *Auvydidy 9U.L,, *AIdIMdaFONIVG LLOITTY 


prayaasurnag 720097 Kg ther ‘2y.84AGo7 


” 


- 


as 


¢ 


{ 


a, 
a 


IN THE MURAL PAINTER 89 


and they were full of a high courage, too, and of an 
enthusiasm so compelling that when a coat of linked 
mail was made for them to paint from and was sent 
up from London, Morris put it on and insisted upon 
wearing it at luncheon. They had delightful swords 
and helmets, but their artistic weapons and ammuni- 
tion were not as substantial as their costume prop- 
erties. They painted with water-color brushes on the 
rough, unprepared stone surface, so that Preraphaelite 
compositions by Morris, Burne-Jones, and Rossetti, 
of gods and heroes, vanished from the walls almost 
as fast as they were painted upon them. No be- 
ginner would follow them quite as far to-day, though 
their naiveté was so charming, their sincerity so 
evident, that one envies them. 

Certainly to-day’s beginner has every right to 
make some mistakes without being laughed at. If 
he is told that he must at once prepare his color- 
sketch and must plan all his operations for a room 
which is to be completed in six months, he goes to 
the said room to inspect and consider it, and finds it 
very probably choked with scaffolding from floor to 
ceiling, and in almost black darkness. In the midst 
of the forest of uprights and horizontal planks, which 
nearly shut out all light, he has to decide whether 
the scale of his figures will be right, whether his tones 
are too light or too dark, his colors too weak or too 
strong. It will not be surprising if the beginner says 
to himself: “My calculation may not turn out nght 


90 IMPORTANCE OF EXPERIENCE 


the first time.” If he does not say as much, and 
does not proceed with caution, he is likely to lose the 
game on his very first cast of the die. Too much 
caution, on the other hand, will tie his hands; and 
many a tame-looking interior proceeds from the fact 
that the inexperienced decorator, new to his task, 
gropes timidly for himself instead of working with 
assurance under some one else, and upon the basis of 
that some one else’s experience. 

Perhaps you say: ““But a man must begin some- 
where. Did not the painters of the Renaissance fear- 
lessly attack any problem, and did not every little 
place have its local man able to celebrate the local 
fastes?” To this I can reply: “Such is the general 
impression, but it is a false one.’ 

Nowhere in the world has parochialism in nolidiee 
and in art, too, been stronger than in Italy. Cam- 
panile has vied with campanile in the celebration 
of its local men; and the medizval hate of town for — 
town has frequently only softened into a prejudice 
which now and again is loudly expressed to-day. 
Nevertheless, the most important local enterprises 
in the heyday times of decoration were not always, 
not even generally, confided to the local man, but 
were governed, or at any rate influenced, by the great 
artists of the moment. Duccio, the Lorenzetti, and 
Martini—all Siennese—decorated not only the city 
but the whole province, and pushed, some of them, as 
far as Naples in the south and probably Avignon in 


IN THE MURAL PAINTER gI 


the north. Giotto and his direct colaborers covered 
the walls of Italy from Naples to Padua. Benozzo 
Gozzoli and Pinturicchio went up and down Tus- 
cany and Umbria; Mantegna’s and Perugino’s were 
(in very different ways) names to conjure with in 
many parts of the peninsula. Michelangelo’s almost 
universal influence was even baneful, because too big 
and forceful for the comprehension of his average 
worshipper. Raphael, it is true, did hardly any dec- 
oration outside of Rome, but only because his short 
life could spare little working time to clients extra 
muros, even if they wore crowns or coronets. Venice 
drew to herself the cleverest artists from the moun- 
tains, lakes, and plains of the mainland—from Ve- 
rona, Cadore, Conegliano, the Bergamasque territory; 
made great artists, world-masters, of them, and sent 
them out again to decorate the walls of all north 
Italy with little reference to their nativity, but 
counting always upon their record of experience; 
while Tiepolo filled Lombardy, the Veneto, South 
Germany, and Spain with the fruits of his prodigious 
activity. It is easy to note an exception or two, ex- 
amples to prove the rule, to cite Correggio in Parma 
(though even in his case it was lack of outside, rather 
than excess of local, appreciation that induced his 
insularity), or to say that the presence of the Urbinate 
Bramante at the papal court gave to the Urbinate 
Raphael his opportunity. In the main the minor 
decorative works of Italy were carried out by the 


92. IMPORTANCE OF EXPERIENCE 


local men. The big marking cycles of decoration for 
the public buildings were the work of the great 
masters who painted not only at home but far afield. 

It is infinitely unlikely that any man to whom 
decoration is a new undertaking, no matter how 
gifted he might be, could successfully confront the 
problems of scale, of lighting, of color, and of 
modelling, as influenced by the said lighting and by 
distance. That is why he should not be given the 
headship of any important decorative enterprise at 
first, but should win his chevrons under a superior 
officer before he earns his epaulets as commander. 
Perhaps you say: “But is it not better to select a 
big man to head a big enterprise? Will not his mis- 
takes be at least the mistakes of a big man instead 
of a little one? Is it not better to risk something 
upon him than to employ some minor personality?” 
Of course, it might be; but where is the necessity 
for such a choice? Such action we had to take 
twenty-five years ago, for at that time, save John 
La Farge, we had no master-decorator in the field; 
then if La Farge were busy elsewhere the best line 
of action to follow was to give the commission to the 
most eminent artist procurable, and trust to his 
working out the decorative problem by degrees, and 
by reason of his all-round capacity. But to-day 
those first men who were chosen, as well as a whole 
group of others, have proved their ability to lead; 
and there is not the slightest need of confiding to an 


IN THE MURAL PAINTER 93 


inexperienced talent, however eminent, the conduct 
of any important enterprise. 

On the contrary, if America is truly to profit by 
the unparalleled opportunity which social, industrial, 
and geographical conditions may in a near future 
offer to the decorative artist, architect, sculptor, 
painter, we must demand the ultimate of the latter, 
the ultimate in talent and experience. He must know 
the art of bygone times thoroughly in order that he 
may utilize its happenings and processes in meeting 
the needs of the present. He must sympathize with 
the branches of art which are sisters to his own; 
and, in sum, he must be a veritable Janus looking 
backward for all that the past may teach him, 
yet not forgetting that he is an American among 
Americans, looking forward upon the threshold of no 
one knows how potential a future. 


IV 


HARMONY BETWEEN BUILDING 
COMMISSIONER AND MURAL PAINTER 


IV 


HARMONY BETWEEN BUILDING 
COMMISSIONER AND MURAL PAINTER 


I 


THERE is an art which is of the people, for the 
people, by the people. It is of the people, for it 
celebrates their annals; it is for them, for it is spread 
upon the walls of their buildings—the public build- 
ings; it is by the people, for it is created by the 
men who were born on our prairies or in our cities. 
It is non-partisan; it preaches to Democrat and 
Republican alike. It should be fostered by both, 
yet it is misunderstood by both. This art should 
be a queen and is a Cinderella. She holds the wand 
of her fairy godmother, Imagination, and can turn 
the commonplace into gold, gold which is instruc- 
tion and stimulus to greater action. Yet our govern- 
ing boards would only too often for false economy’s 
sake turn back the golden chariot of imagination 
into a pumpkin again. 

This art is the art of mural painting and decorative 
sculpture—in a wider sense, the art of decoration. 

07 


98 BUILDING COMMISSIONER 


To-day in America we have an altogether unpar- 
alleled opportunity. We have vast wealth, we have 
vast territory. We have cities planned and cities 
building, and cities built yet growing. Under less 
favorable circumstances Greece and Italy, France 
and England raised monuments which have been a 
joy and an illustration for millennials. How care- 
ful, then, we should be of our opportunity, for 
unless we do have a care we may leave behind us 
buildings many of which at best are but half suc- 
cesses, some of which occasion little save regret. 

Why did they do so well in the past? Because the 
artist—I mean the architect, sculptor, painter—had 
the people as his constituency, and the people gave 
their labor and their money freely in exchange for 
beauty, which to them was a commodity, a commod- 
ity understood and valued. Together with beauty 
the people demanded utility and convenience, and 
obtained them, but they never forgot beauty, and 
in the creation of that great teacher of history, pa- 
triotism, morals, zsthetics, which is the decorated 
public building—town hall, or temple, or cathedral 
—they never condemned beauty to take even a 
second place. 

Why have we done so much less well? Because 
our people never think of giving beauty the first 
place. Above it they set convenience, and some 
times above that financial benefit to some person 
or persons indeterminate. 


NI 4 U 8 . Nl J 1 . . d 4 
EE 3 1 2) SAB 
33 


ce 


ONTAACT “AQ “L, 


wt 


, 


AND MURAL PAINTER 99 


You may reply that we do not always sacrifice 
beauty, and, secondly, that utility is more important 
than beauty. The answer to your first objection is 
that there have been a number of honorable excep- 
tions of State capitols and court-houses and libraries 
whose commissioners have seriously insisted upon 
beauty, but I am here characterizing and condemn- 
ing the greater number of cases. To your second 
objection one may reply that to sacrifice utility to 
beauty might be wrong, but that no such sacrifice 
is necessary. With brains, money, and patience, 
utility and beauty may always become yoke-fellows 
in a great public building, since beauty is indeed 
the artistic expression of utility. 


II 


Why, then, do we not have them together, since 
brains our architects have, money our public appro- 
priates, and of patience there still exists a modicum? 
Let us look into the matter. 

In decoration the relation of artist to client will 
for some time be complicated by the newness of the 
situation. In American art mural painting is a new- 
comer. Even in Europe it is the child of a relatively 
recent renaissance, a renaissance forty years old at 
most. But in America it is more than a newcomer; it 
is a newcomer environed and confronted by wholly 
changed conditions. It is like a leader of a brand- 


100 BUILDING COMMISSIONER 


new political party bringing in with him a group of 
men who “knew not Joseph” and whose ideas of 
government and economy are revolutionary. The 
buyer and collector of easel pictures, donor to and 
founder of museums, is one of two things—either he 
is a cultured man and lover of art, or else he is one 
who wishes to become cultured and to be a patron. 
In the first case he relies on his own culture, in the 
second on the culture of friends or experts who 
teach him how to buy and give. But in either case, 
and this is my point, he studies the intrinsic and mar- 
ket value of the pictures, and a considerable price 
asked and paid adds zest to his action and prestige 
to his collection. To put a great deal of money into 
his purchase intelligently is one of his objects. Now 
in the procedure which occurs in relation to mural 
painting exactly the contrary obtains. 

Mural painting in America is usually accorded only 
to public or semipublic buildings, capitols, town 
halls, court-houses, libraries, churches, schools, thea- 
tres, hotels. The erection of a public building is 
placed in the hands of a board of building commis- 
sioners. These men are presumably chosen for their 
business ability, their integrity, and their public 
spirit, and in most cases they prove their possession 
of these attributes. But also in most cases they 
differ absolutely in their point of view on this par- 
ticular matter from the private collector and donor 
to museums. The collector means to have the best 


AND MURAL PAINTER IOI 


art, but he knows that for the best he must lavish 
money, though he is determined that intelligence 
shall so guide his lavishness as to resolve it into a 
future asset and profit. Now I am not speaking of 
the connoisseur who accidentally becomes a build- 
ing commissioner, but of the average commissioner 
who is in quite another state of mind. He also 
wishes to have the best art, and demands it, but he 
desires even more strongly not to expend much of 
the people’s money for it. Able and honest though 
he is in other respects and along other lines, he does 
not understand art. 

He cannot see far enough into the future to realize 
that good mural panels will inevitably become a 
financial asset, and his reasoning, though honest, will 
not go deep enough to prove to him that public 
money expended on third-class art is public money 
squandered. He does not, until after he has acquired 
real experience, know the difference between first, 
second, and third rate art, and he suspects those who 
could teach him, suspects them of being interested. 
Now we must not account this as blameworthy, for 
it is natural and at first inevitable. 

The building commissioner, no matter how able 
he may be, can learn, as the rest of us do, only by 
experience, and for a long time he is bound to be the 
victim of circumstances which he can but gradually 
learn to control. 

He is a good business man, his strongest instinct 


102 BUILDING COMMISSIONER 


is to not make a bad investment, and his first idea 
of a good investment is of one which returns more 
than it demands. He thinks in terms of straight 
commercialism. For instance, he knows that to 
make a certain kind of shoe costs such a sum, to 
make a thousand of them would cost a thousand 
times as much minus such discount as wholesale 
manufacture renders possible. He learns that a pic- 
ture two feet square, by Mr. Blank, the artist, has 
just been sold for so much. He expects Blank to 
be able to tell him at once exactly what a lunette 
superficially twenty times as large shall cost. He 
- cannot conceive why the artist is doubtful and hes- 
itates, and he suspects him of hedging. But the 
shoe is a problem which has been proved; it is well 
known just how much time and material go to its 
making. It is not so with the painted lunette—the 
work may proceed rapidly or slowly, may demand, 
as it develops, more or less elaboration than the 
author had expected when he contracted for it. 
What a field is here for disappointment and suspi- 
cion, and perfectly honest disagreement between the 
artist and the commissioner who is navigating un- 
tried waters! 

The commissioners thoroughly understand econ- 
omy when it means saving money by not expending 
it; when, for instance, it amounts to paying one 
thousand dollars to B instead of twenty-five hundred 
to A; but they cannot understand the economy 


AND MURAL PAINTER 103 


which consists in not spending good money upon 
feeble thought or poor work. They cannot compre- 
hend the waste involved in paying B one thousand 
dollars for almost worthless creations, instead of 
giving twenty-five hundred to A for something good. 
The output is obvious to them, the value returned 
is unfamiliar, they cannot estimate it, and when the 
architect assures them that it is great, they think of 
him doubtfully, as of one necessarily interested and 
probably prejudiced. 

Again, save in rare cases, the commissioners can- 
not grasp the importance of the art required in the 
creation of a public building. Tradition has conse- 
crated it, history celebrated it, fashion has dictated 
pilgrimage to shrines of art as a duty, and, indeed, 
the commissioner himself while on his particular 
pilgrimage to Europe may be temporarily dazzled 
while he is actually in presence of the building or 
picture or statue, but when he has turned his back 
upon them his memory is too imperfect to sustain 
enthusiasm. A, who is a famous and experienced 
architect, or sculptor, or painter, suggests to the 
building commissioners a creation which shall cost 
so much and shows his design. B, a much less 
interesting artist, offers another costing one-quarter 
as much. The commissioners say, in all sincerity, 
that as soon as preliminary business is cleared away 
they will give the commission to A as the better 
man. 


104 BUILDING COMMISSIONER 


The clearing of preliminary business proceeds, the 
bills for lighting and plumbing are much larger than 
were expected, also some other bills. Economy 
must be practised; where shall this occur? In the 
decoration of the building, of course—lighting and 
plumbing are necessary, art as a superfluity may be 
mulcted. 

Now this is folly, folly most of all in a new coun- 
try which lacks the example of fine buildings. Good 
art is not a superfluity; it is a prime necessity; it 
comes immediately after indispensable convenience, 
and much convenience might to advantage be dis- 
pensed with in its favor. Lighting, heating, and 
plumbing should be of the best, but should not for 
one moment be provided at the expense of good art. 
Science advances so fast that in relatively few years 
the systems of lighting, heating, plumbing, will be 
improved out of existence in that particular build-— 
ing, and will have to be paid for over again. On 
the other hand, the best art lasts practically forever. 
The pilgrims to the decorations of the Sistine Chapel 
fell into line four hundred years ago, and are still 
on the march; the marble deities of the Parthenon’s 
pediments and frieze have received visitors for 
more than two thousand years. In short, the com- 
missioners who dock the appropriation for decora- 
tion in favor of the appropriation for plumbing and 
lighting sacrifice the possibly enduring for the in- 
evitably ephemeral. 


AND MURAL PAINTER 105 


But you could not convince any building com- 
mission of that, unless it be composed of men who 
at once think for themselves, respect historical rec- 
ords, and listen fair-mindedly to artists and experts. 
Ninety-nine times out of a hundred you could not 
win your case, for you would not be allowed to plead 
it. Immediate economy would be the order of the 
day at the meeting. B’s design, which cost only 
one-quarter as much as A’s, would gain enormously 
in its appeal, so much, indeed, as to look nearly 
as good as A’s; and the commissioners, sincerely 
desirous of doing right, would be perplexed by many 
worrying conditions. We have said that forced to 
retrenchment they are hesitating between the first- 
rate artist A, whose work is expensive, and the 
second-rate man B, whose services may be had for 
much less; but if they choose to, the commissioners 
may descend far lower in the scale of price and almost 
as certainly of intrinsic value. 

At their elbow stand representatives of various 
firms of decorators and of department stores, say- 
ing, “We will do all this work for half B’s price,” 
and showing sketches dangerously attractive to the 
non-professional, because making up for a lack of 
real merit by a profuse display of detail and high 
finish. Recently a talented young mural painter 
told me that an order for a decoration had been prac- 
tically given him, and had been warmly approved by 
the architect, when, at the last moment, he lost it in 


106 BUILDING COMMISSIONER 


this wise. A department store sent word to the client 
that if he would buy all his rugs from their firm they — 
would include mural painting for the rooms. Again, 
the same young artist had entered into negotiations 
for the painting of seven subjects in a panelled room; 
a “‘decorative”’ firm offered to do twice as many 
panels for half the money. In each case the client 
yielded to the temptation of a lower price, and in 
each case as well his conclusions may seem doubtful 
to the unprejudiced onlooker. 

It is perhaps only natural that the local houses 
should also sometimes appeal to the building com- 
missioner’s patriotism, saying: ‘‘We are local men; 
give us the work and not a dollar of your taxpayers’ 
money shall leave our town, whereas A comes from 
New York, or Chicago, or Philadelphia, and what 
he receives will be literally taken away from us.” 

Amid all these specious appeals and counter- 
statements the commissioners are so harried that 
compromise sometimes ensues; they reject the work 
of A, the first-rate artist, so that they may economize 
money for the plumbing; then they decline the offer 
of the department store, in the interest of high art, 
and feel that by thus compromising they are, on the 
whole, doing rather a handsome and artistic thing for 
the public in giving it the uninteresting second-rate — 
work of B instead of fourth-rate commercial work 
offered perhaps by a frank jobber, or the first-rate 
work of A. They have made a deplorable mistake, 


Barry Fautkner: Fragment of decoration in the house of 


Mrs. E. H. Harriman 


Example of the decorative effect of elaborate detail carried out in fifteenth-century style 
and with the heads treated as portraits 


Py ps epeceas Mat Se 


: : 
: : ; Sage 
> ee 
a ‘ = 72 


AND MURAL PAINTER 107 


because they are unenlightened, and their public 
will suffer for it long after they, the commissioners, 
become enlightened, for it is only enlightenment which 
they lack. The building commissioners are sincere 
and patriotic men, chosen for their public spirit and 
their business capacity, and both commission and 
public away down at the bottom of their conscious- 
ness want the best art in return for their money. 
Only the best art is fit for the decoration of the public 
building, and if you put it straightly at them the 
people admit this at once, but the bottom of their 
artistic consciousness can be reached only by patient 
sounding, which must be incessant if it is to be ef- 
fectual against the mass of misconception which 
constantly accumulates upon the surface. 


V 


MUTUALITY BETWEEN ARCHITECT 
AND MURAL PAINTER 


V 


MUTUALITY BETWEEN ARCHITECT 
AND MURAL PAINTER 


BesipEs the possession of talent and experience 
there must be mutuality of effort between architect 
and mural painter. If we can have real co-opera- 
tion, beauty will come after it as surely as harvest 
after seed-time. But it must be real; it must not 
resume itself in a mere suggestion on the part of 
the building committee that the architect shall 
consult the best talent, followed by his only say- 
ing in turn to the various painters: “‘Now, I count 
on you to respect each other’s work and to obtain 
an harmonious ensemble.” ‘That is not enough. 
To begin with, the sculptor and painter must be- 
lieve in the architect as commander-in-chief, leader, 
designer, and creator of a whole, which they are 
to enhance as a whole by their art; and again 
they must see in him the planner of interrelated 
parts whose interrelations they must help, not 
hinder. 


I have heard painters say: ‘‘What does an archi- 
IIL 


112, MUTUALITY. BETWEEN ARCHITECT 


tect know about painting?” Now the architect, in 
spite of his general knowledge, is, like the painter, 
a specialist, and therefore is forced to neglect much 
that pertains to painting because he has not had 
time to learn it. But I am certain that if any com- 
petent mural painter will take pains to show things 
in the right way, he will be understood in the right 
way by the architect. The trouble is that each 
branch of a profession has a technical jargon of its 
own, unfamiliar to the practitioners of the two 
sister branches; but all that applies specially to 
either sculpture or painting can be reduced to 
terms which are understood by architect, painter, 
and sculptor alike, and which may constitute a kind 
of artistic Volapiik—a common language, like the 
medizval Latin of the church. 

We have thus far done fairly well in decorative 
painting in America, but we have made some mis- 
takes, and our worst errors have arisen from lack of 
Proper co-operation, which has come, not from a 
want of honest enthusiasm or individual knowledge, 
but because a certain comprehension has been want- 
ing. It has been stated over and over again from 
the beginning that architect, sculptor, and painter 
must work together in the sense of producing a 
mutual result, but it has not been realized that the 
three minds must, for a time at least, work simul- 
taneously and intercommunicatively—that the three 
men must agree to all give up some of their time af 


(Cg ‘H “WY suoneiosap 
Aur Jo Jsoul jo sulutied ay} Ul sjUP)sIssY AW usdeq dAY JasUIIO. pur a}UalapY “SIssay/() *wejqgoid suo uodn sjusUul 
-viadWi9} OM} JO UOT} R1IQUIDUOD JO PUL YIOM-Ued} JO} SOATOSWI9Y} PoUles] DAVY OYM USW OM} Aq uol}e10Dap jo ojduiexo uy 


ISNOFJ-11NOZ) MoU dy} UI 
SOLI9S OY} WOT, Joueg ,,WUIsAg pur jseg ‘sloyUOL,, :ALNIAAACY LNAONIA GNV AFONINOT “WY ‘VW 


saayio{ {2 429 ay, A sy8t4ad Gor 


AND MURAL PAINTER 113, 


the same time to the problem. The architect is 
almost sure to be foreseeing and resourceful, but he 
cannot be in two places at once and there are con- 
tingencies which no man can foresee. He needs not 
only the support of his staff, but their constant 
watchful effort. 

And the co-operation should begin at the begin- 
ning. I would have the painter as well as the 
sculptor go with the architect to the quarry when 
the stone is selected, so that he, the architect, 
the director, in company with the sculptor and 
painter, his aids, shall see and know just what char- 
acter of color, what tone and depth the three shall 
have to calculate upon in their various results. For 
if it is the business of the expert to know the dur- 
ability of the marble, and that of the architect to 
determine its effect of line and mass, scale and pro- 
portion, it is the business of the painter to say what 
color effect it may produce and what it may call for 
in other marbles. And I would have this little 
federation go further afield: to the artist who puts 
on the gold, and the artist who carves the wood, and 
the artists who make the glass and weave the carpet. 
That they are on the general staff we have said, 
and that they are consulted; but to-day they too 
often remain in their tents till the battle is engaged 
and half over. I would have them ride not only 
into the pitched field, but also, and above all, in 
reconnoissance to spy out the land before the battle. 


114 MUTUALITY BETWEEN ARCHITECT 


Indeed, the carrying through of the ensemble and 
details of a great building should be done almost 
under martial law. Woe to him who is undisciplined. 
If a man cannot subordinate himself let him keep 
out of mural painting. All art is a convention and 
is under restraint—most of all is decorative art so; 
and if an artist is big enough he cannot give better 
proof of his power than in compelling the relation 


of his work to be harmonious with its surroundings, — 


while he yet remains himself. 


We have proceeded rightly up to a certain point 


in decoration, but not far enough. To-day the 
architect of the State capitol of Cloudland, let us 
call it, selects six mural painters to decorate his 
building, and allots to them his various wall spaces. 
The artists make their rough sketches, the archi- 


tect convenes them, they mutually compare their — 


work, and sincerely declare that they will do every- 
thing that they can to work harmoniously. 

Almost at once starts the train of circumstances 
which interrupts their willingness and interferes 


with their harmony. A is very busy finishing a 


canvas for another State; he cannot commence his 
decoration for some months. B, on the contrary, 
must begin his at once, since he has engagements for 
the future which compel immediate action unless 
he would indefinitely postpone his Cloudland work. 
C has a room or wall space or corridor midway be- 
tween the decorations of A and B. If the vision 


tae” ale 
ee) ae I. 2 


AND MURAL PAINTER 115 


can embrace these three decorations or even portions 
of the three at the same time, it is essential that C’s 
work should harmonize with and unite that of the 
other two painters. 

A proceeds with his decoration; after a while B, 
who has also commenced his work and carried it 
_ well forward, goes to see A, and says in great sur- 
prise: “But A, the sketch you showed at the archi- 
tect’s office was in a cool gray key; I have been 
treating my decoration in harmony with your sketch, 
and now you are working in a warm orange key 
upon your large canvas!” “Yes,” replies A, “I sud- 
denly discovered that they were going to exchange 
the gray Circassian walnut of my wooden furnish- 
ings for a very red mahogany.” ‘But how does it 
happen that you had nowarning?”’ “Well, the archi- 
tect was called away to the west on business, and 
A B & Co., the decorative firm, who are in charge 
of the woodwork, changed their mind about the 
latter.” | 

Or, Mr. C has been told that his room will get 
little light because of the thick stained glass of rather 
dark warm tones. He therefore paints his decoration 
in flat planes of brilliant color exactly suited to such 
a twilight effect. When it is finished and he brings 
it to its place he finds twice as much light as he ex- 
pected and pale transparent glass in the cupola. 
His own colors, which would have been just right 
for the room as first planned, are now strident, his 


116 MUTUALITY BETWEEN ARCHITECT 


effect spoiled. He protests and the glassmaker 
replies: “The building commission insisted that 
they must have more light. There was nothing to 
do but to humor their insistence.” 

Or Mr. C D composes his decoration and has 
half finished it when some one remarks: “By the 
way, they will have to set a ventilator in the middle 
of your wall.” 

These are only a few instances among very many 
difficulties which may unexpectedly present them- 
selves. Is it the fault of the architect? No, not 
more than it is the fault of any and all of us that 
we do not quite realize what an enormously difficult 
and complicated problem we have before us in a 
great building, nor enough consider that, while the 
architect must be argus-eyed, his staff too must re- 
member their responsibility not only to him and to 
their own work, but to every one of the many artists 
in stone, glass, bronze, pavement, mural painting, 
whose work in any way abuts upon theirs. It may 
be impossible to prevent some mischances, but at 
least an elaborate plan of campaign should do much 
toward forestalling some of the changes, and a 
united front of many artists opposing a decision of 
the building commissioners (besides taking some 
responsibility off the architect’s shoulders) might go 
far toward preventing unwisdom. And such op- 
position would, in nine cases out of ten, not displease 
the building commissioners, since the latter are 


AND MURAL PAINTER 117 


really seeking for the best solution of their problem, 
and are glad to avoid change as being costly. 

In some few cases this mutual federation of archi- 
tect, sculptor, and painter has been tried, and found 
to work so well that it has been continued after the 
completion of the building, continued in the form of 
a permanent advisory art committee, whose duty is 
to protect the building from any unwise additions or 
changes. 

That there is need of such advisory work we have 
had abundant evidence. I will note one instance: 
In a certain great building by one of our best-known 
architects, a room was decorated with painting and 
sculpture at much expense. The effect depended in 
the main upon several large wall panels of smooth 
simple stone. These panels, surrounded by rich 
sculpture, gave repose to the eye, and were the nat- 
ural complement and foil to the ceiling and upper 
walls, which were elaborately decorated with paint- 
ings, relief, and gold. The building commission, de- 
lighted with the room, showed it with pride and 
celebrated it in print. 

After a while they filled the Ele with full- 
length portraits of gentlemen in black clothes and 
surrounded by heavy gilt frames. They thereby 
utterly ruined the effect which the architect had 
planned. The portraits, if properly panelled into 
the right kind of a wall in another room, might have 
produced an admirable result. As they are now 
they spoil the effect of the stone, and are in turn 


118 MUTUALITY BETWEEN ARCHITECT 


themselves spoiled by the light stone about them, 
which makes such a background as their painters 
would never have selected. 

You say these gentlemen must be dull. Not so, 
they are among the most intelligent’ men in the 
community, and were honestly enthusiastic, to be- 
gin with, about their room. The result of their action 
has been the almost complete cancellation of the 
value received from their artists. If such a cancel- 
lation had taken place in any other part of their 
building, in their transaction of business, that is, 
and such depreciation had resulted they would have 
bestirred themselves at once, but it has not occurred 
to’ them that this matter could be of importance. 
They wanted portraits of their colleagues, and, 
having them, simply ordered them to be put into 
the finest room, and where they could see them well 
—then thought no more of it. Had an advisory 
committee of architect, sculptor, and painter said to 
them, “But, gentlemen, your portraits will kill the 
room, and the room will kill the portraits,” I cannot 
help believing that they would have renounced their 
project, and thus advisory stimulus would have 
helped to bring about mutual action between artist 
and client; in fact, would have helped to raise and 
maintain a standard of taste. 


In this effort toward mutuality, vital to the suc- 
cess of any great enterprise in decoration, the archi- 
tect is then essentially the head and commander-in- 


AJPAVIOIOp pur A][vdTIOIsIy pa}ves} odevospur] jo ajdurvxa uy 


AVI) YIOX MON fasnoPy-woysnyd soi¥1g pewuy sy? 
1OJ9TJOD 9Y} UI ..sJOg AINjUsd-YIUIEIUSAIG JO SZUTUIEY,, JO Sallas B JO DUD !AASNUVD “Y YAINTY 


o 66 


jo WOO! Ss, 


ERE OHRL ECR, 
= R 


ce 


s 
* 


AND MURAL PAINTER 119 


chief. He designs the building and assigns to each 
sculptor and painter his place in it. But if this is 
his unquestionable right it is also his privilege to 
expect and to receive authoritative assistance from 
both sculptor and painter, not only as their work 
progresses, but even before it begins. In a general 
way he, the architect, knows beforehand what man- 
ner of man is suited to some special work, but in a 
particular way that man, once selected, knows in 
turn how to fit his own temperament to that work 
and how he may best suggest amplification or elab- 
oration of it. The architect, burdened with the 
great weight of his responsibility, has a right to de- 
mand that the painters and sculptors shall minimize 
that weight by intimate and patient collaboration. 
Our educational institutions have no worthier 
task before them along the lines of art than the prep- 
aration of men who shall learn how to help toward 
this end and be willing to help at some sacrifice. 
For the untrained worker is a burden to the archi- 
tect; the man who knows and will use his knowl- 
edge reasonably and patiently is a blessing. On the 
other hand, to the advice of the trained sculptor 
and mural painter the architect, master and com- 
mander though he be, may, indeed must, at times, 
listen as to the sister arts speaking with authority. 
Architect, sculptor, and painter have each re- 
ceived a special training during which, if they are 
wise, they will have carefully considered the kin- 


120 MUTUALITY BETWEEN ARCHITECT 


dred lines of the sister branches of their art; yet each 
remains essentially architect, or sculptor, or painter, 
and certain details, even certain principles, familiar 
to one of his two comrades will be unfamiliar, per- 
haps unnoticed by hin, till his collaborator notes 
them and formulates them from the point of view of 
his own particular expertism. I have seen an other- 
wise clever painter so arrange his panel in reference 
to surrounding members of the wall that the archi- 
tect said, with reason: “But this is impossible.” 
In such a case the painter must alter his work. On 
the other hand, now and then, even if rarely, an 
architect has put in a detail of color which any 
painter at his elbow would have forbidden. 

And when I say a detail I mean hundreds of feet 
of marble which cost thousands of dollars. In the 
beginning, and when the order was given, it would 
have cost ten words to make it right. After the 
mistake was made it would have taken prohibit- 
ory time and cost prohibitory money to rectify it. 
The greatest artists are capable of solecisms and errors 
along lines akin to, but not identical with, their own. 
A little consultation would obviate such mistakes, 
and we do not want the blunders even of a Michel- 
angelo when they can be avoided. And blunders 
he did make—they all made them—Bramante and 
Raphael and Leonardo made them just as we do, 
only theirs were blunders of men who lived in an 
age of great art, and at the same time they made 


AND MURAL PAINTER 121 


masterpieces, setting lessons to an admiring world. 
When Michelangelo painted the ‘‘Last Judgment,”’ 
he botched the joining and gravely injured the 
architectonic effect of the chapel, but he is Michel- 
angelo, and we are glad to take him in exchange for 
Perugino. Correggio’s angels are strangely out of 
character with the grand austere Romanesque shell 
of the cathedral at Parma, but Romanesque churches 
are many—Correggio’s ecstatic outburst is unique. 
For that matter, disturbance, arising from the in- 
troduction of new and changed methods, has been 
inevitable where the theatre of performance has 
existed for five hundred years, and the sixteenth- 
century artist had to paint within a yard or two 
of the work of the tre cento. History repeats itself, 
and in the future, when there shall arise better- 
equipped artists than those of to-day, anachronistic 
additions may again be welcome. But in the pres- 
ent it is for us to do our work so faithfully and so 
thoughtfully as to make that future remote. 


= % “ ~ ~ : oi. a+” 
ze r = Slee : 
= an ws 2 
‘ % ” 
}. > 7 
. > 
: he ae 
ql > 
= ’ 
* = 


e 


[ALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 


‘ 


VI 
MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 


I 


THE relations of the mural painter with the build- 
ing commissioner and with the architect have been 
discussed in preceding chapters. We come now to 
the relations of mural painters with each other, and 
to the thorniest and most delicate question in the 
range of decoration—the question of precedence. 
Thorny though it be, if it is grasped as one would 
grasp a nettle and by a hand which wears the gaunt- 
let of assured experience—difficult though it be, if 
it is approached with tact and adhered to with 
patience the problem can be solved. 

It is a prodigious problem, indeed; nothing less 
than to compel into accord various temperaments 
of men who control not only the design and coloring 
of pictured panels and mosaics, but of ornament, 
rich or severe, toning of gold, patina of bronze, 
depth or clearness of glass, design and color of pave- 
ments, selection of rugs, and very much besides. 


First must come the wise distribution of this work, 
125 


126 MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS > 


then the harmonious conduct of it. If even the 
artists of the culminating epoch made mistakes, what 
procedure shall we follow to minimize our errors? 
Let us consider this question of distribution. In 
the largest sense all branches of art are equally 
great and important; all have certain vital princi- 
ples in common, as well as much detail of procedure. 
Decoration (mural painting or decorative sculpture) 
is, however, essentially different from the others in 
some respects; primarily in this, that it is based, 
rooted even, upon and in sacrifice. | 
The end and aim of it is the beauty which can 
come only from harmony, and for the sake of that 
harmony the artists must constantly repress them- 
selves, hold themselves back, sacrifice themselves. 
In other branches of art and under other circum- 
stances, in an annual exhibition of pictures for in- 
stance, it is perfectly legitimate, though not always 
desirable, to force an effect in one’s own work so 
far that beside it juxtaposed canvases might appear 
weak and secondary. In the decoration of a room 
where there is collaboration between two or more 
persons, things are different, the chief desideratum. 
in decoration being the production of a harmonious 
whole. If one collaborator tries to make himself 
conspicuous by the display of a more forcible per- 
sonality than that of his fellow, he becomes danger- 
ous—virtuosity, a quality desirable per se, may swell 
into a disturbing note. Direct rivalry, then, being 


Jures Guerin: Interior of the Pennsylvania Railroad Station, with men 
working at the decorative maps 


An example of topography made decorative and used as part of a decorative ensemble 


oe) 
‘ 
. 
Z m- 
H 
1 
ri wt 
- 
i. 
‘ . 
5 hey ‘ 
ae 
* 5 pat 
GD 
: wt 


MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 127 


perilous, how shall we reduce its proportions with a 
view to obtaining a good general result? 

The consideration of this difficult question may be 
divided into two main questions, which in turn are 
subject to much subdivision. The first is the prob- 
lem of setting two or more painters at work in the 
‘same room. This is at once reduced to minimal 
proportions by the fact that few rooms are so exten- 
sive and contain so many places for important mural 
painting as to require more than one man to execute 
the latter. 

But there are parts of a great building so vast and 
complicated that one man could not decorate them 
within any reasonable time. A typical example is 
that in which the great central dome grows upon its 
pendentives from piers and lower walls, and termi- 
nates in the dome-crown or lantern. Where such an 
example occurs, the prodigious gestation of a huge 
public building may compel the evolution of twins, 
triplets, or even a quartet of artists. In such a case 
twins they must be as far as possible; that is to say, 
men chosen because of their mutual resemblance in 
predisposition, aims, and methods. 

To discover such yoke-fellows is pretty nearly as 
hard as to find the proverbial white blackbird, yet 
they have been found now and again, and have 
worked together with relative success. In the past 
there have been many examples of such fortunate 
juxtaposition (for instance, the church of Santa Maria 
at Saronno where Luini, Lanini, and Ferrari fill 


128 MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 


dome and pendentives and walls with their com- 
positions). But the art of bygone times was more 
of a kind than ours is. The schools which grew up 
by the Ilyssus and the Arno were far less confused 
by visions of outlying fields of endeavor than are we 
who are at once beneficiaries and victims of a pro- 
digious art-inheritance. Even the Italians, for all 
their homogeneity, have left us in their churches and 
palaces many examples of what to avoid. Time, 
that kindest of over-painters, who uses glazes and 
scumbling rather than solid colors, has done much to 
harmonize; but in spite of him some of their juxta- 
positions are shocking even to-day, and when the 
recklessly imtemperate crowding of pictures, prac- 
tised in the late sixteenth century, is added, the 
spectator 1s giddy and worse than surfeited in such 
churches, say, as Santa Caterina of Venice. 

We in America, young and inexperienced as we are, 
have committed no such glaring faults of taste as 
are found in many Italian buildings; indeed, the 
painting of realistic landscapes upon piers (!) in the 
modern Hotel de Ville of Paris is an innovation 
which has fortunately not been emulated by any 
American. In fact, for our own comfort we might 


multiply instances to show that while the heights 


scaled by Italian decorators may be unattainable by 
modern men, the depths of false taste into which 
the later Italians descended have not been sounded 
by our comparatively unsophisticated painters. 
‘History then proves collaboration to be exacting. 


a - 
al —o= 


MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 129 


What is the lesson of this? It is that, since artists 
are human—and we all naturally and instinctively 
try to show our personality—and since collaboration 
cannot be dispensed with in public buildings, it 
must be carefully considered, and so carried out 
that there shall be the least possible loss of indi- 
viduality on the part of the collaborators, but that 
_when all is said and done harmony must result. 

Now, the practice of collaboration is no easy 
matter; human nature at once takes a hand and 
makes it a very difficult one. Where there are even 
two collaborators there is some loss of power, since 
each has to bend his own temperament a little to- 
ward the united purpose; if there are three, the case 
is still more trying; if there are ten, all have to hold 
themselves down, to a certain extent, to the level of 
the least able man in the group. 

It is easy to see that so wholesale a sacrifice upon 
the altar of collaboration would victimize not only 
those offered up, but the public as well—it would re- 
sult in stultification. What are we going to do to 
avoid it? This—give just as much as possible of 
the work within the radius of vision to one man. 
Such a proceeding is in large part feasible in any 
great building. There are, as we have said before, 
always many separate rooms; these can be given 
each to one temperament; that is to say, to one 
artist. 

There are other places in the building which are 


130 MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 


not really separate rooms, yet which are so subdi- 
vided into different parts by connecting corridors 
or vestibules that, if they were decorated by different 
painters, the passage from the result of one artistic 
temperament to that of another could be made 
without mental disturbance. In such portions of 


the building two or more men may work advanta- 


geously. Again, there are spaces so vast and hav- 
ing such complicated parts (I have cited a central 
rotunda) that it becomes impossible to give all the 
work to one man; he would not have time to do it 
properly in the period allowed by contract. In 
such a case the problem of distribution should be 
considered with reference not so much to the repu- 
tation and rank of the persons chosen as to their 
temperamental capacity for working together. 

We artists all know that there are men with whom 
we can work, and others, equally good, with whom 
we cannot. There are painters whose canvases would 
harmonize fairly well from the start; given good- 
will, the harmony could be made greater as the work 
advanced. On the other hand, there are those whose 
temperaments, as shown in their work, differ so 
much that we feel from the beginning the useless- 
ness, even the danger, of yoking them. 

There are men who carefully prepare their whole 
scheme beforehand; with them you know exactly 
what you are going to get. Such artists are rela- 
tively safe, but their inelasticity has to be reckoned 


a ee 


MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 131 


with. Again, we have those who also prepare an 
elaborate scheme, but, realizing that each problem 
may be a new one, make experiments and changes, 
and usually better their work as they proceed. 
Lastly, there are artists who are natural improvi- 
sators; their decoration is perforce an impromptu. 
Such men may prove most brilliant of all, but it 
is almost impossible for them to work with others, 
because, as they present no scheme beforehand, the 
others, and they themselves, are at a disadvantage 
as far as harmony goes. Where you have such a 
man you must give him a room to himself; then 
you may obtain a brilliant result. 

When, therefore, a part of a building which can- 
not be given to one artist is distributed among sev- 
eral, I believe that the collaborators should meet, 
present their schemes in common, choose one of their 
number to be dictator as to essentials, and obey him. 
For if several men without a leader or preliminary 
mutual practice attack the dragon of difficulty to- 
gether they will hamper each other; two of them 
will waste a stroke at the same time; they will even 
fall over each other. If, on the contrary, the dic- 
tator has three qualities—firmness, tact, and knowl- 
edge—the result will be satisfactory. If there is not 
some such leadership there are three chances to 
one that the decoration will not hang together and 
that the architect will be disheartened. Collective 
unwisdom has more than once unmade plans which 


132, MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 


a little more mutual action would have brought to 


fruition. Wherever itis possible the painter should 
act directly under the architect. I, personally, should 
vastly prefer to do so, but if I must be part of a 


general scheme in which others share, and if the ar- 
chitect is not able to give constant and close super- 


vision, I should like to see a director chosen and 


should then follow him loyally or else drop out of | 


the scheme. And if a man have originality he can 
show it even while conforming to direction. 

Even in one room where the vision is distinctly 
bounded by four walls, since painting is apt not to be 
the sole form of decoration employed, several tem- 


peraments are apt to come in contact although one — 


be in control; and just in measure as that controller 
is able to control himself as well as others, just in 
measure as he is able to understand and consider the 
strong and weak points of his collaborators, will his 
result be fortunate. 

He is having abundant trouble with his own per- 
sonal equation, but it will be complicated by the 
working of other personal equations at his elbow—by 
those of the men who are designing bronze electrical 
fixtures, who are composing a tessellated pavement, 
who are setting the stained-glass windows. Some- 
times neither sculpture nor painting distinctly dom- 
inates in a great room, but the two have a parity of 
importance as decorative elements; in such a case 
sculptor and painter must proceed with infinite cau- 


se he * Sid 
oe “ 
 y tee 


WiuiiaMm Lavrev Harris: Example of the laying out, in the Church of St. 
Paul the Apostle, New York, of a decoration which is being executed in 
color, gold, and relief 


sha 


; 


} 


-MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 133 


tion and mutual consideration so as neither to harm 
each other nor have to put their own temperaments 
into strait-jackets. It jis probable that building 
commissioners and public alike have not realized that 
the problem of the creation of a public building is 
to be approached with respect which should amount 
‘to reverence, for the successful accomplishment of 
such a creation sets the capstone on achievement. 
And this is why decoration as a disciplinary field is 
unsurpassed by any other in the whole range of 
painting. 


IT 


All the different branches of art interlace at cer- 
tain points, and all are wide apart at certain others. 
Mural painting differs most from its sister branches 
in this respect—as has been already insisted—in 
decoration it is not so much individuality of expres- 
sion as mutual effort that is essential. There is a 
corollary to this statement, and a very important 
one, which sounds paradoxical but is true—it is only 
through this mutuality of effort pushed and per- 
fected that the highest individuality of expression 
in decoration is attained. The Parthenon, the church 
of St. Francis of Assisi, the Borgia apartments of 
the Vatican, the Stanze of Raphael, the Anticollegio 
of the Ducal Palace, the halls and churches painted 
by Tiepolo are so individual in their effect, their 
forcefulness, that we have only to close our eyes 


134 MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 


to see them standing out as landmarks of historic, 
zesthetic sequence. — 

But to the production of this individual effect 
have contributed a subordination and merging of the 
personalities, the individualities of the artists con- 
cerned, the architects, sculptors, painters, carvers, 
gilders, mosaic men, glass men, that can be under- 
stood fully only by him who is at once a student of 
history and a practitioner of decoration. 

Perhaps the completest example of subordination 
of individuality, of mutuality of effort, may be found 
in the medizval cathedral, where Guillaume and 
Etienne planned and built side by side, and Jean 
began the sculptured story which Jacques continued 
and Pierre finished, and Roger and Henri placed the 
trefoils and hexafoils of glass, and Francois and 
Blaise braided stone flowers about the capital or set 
the portal ablooming. 

And all harmoniously, so harmoniously that they 
forgot themselves and were forgotten in their work. 
When all was done and a minster stood as the 
result, if we are asked who created it we have to 
answer: “‘ Master So and So, John or James or Will- 
iam, of Chartres or Amiens or Bourges.” Such a 
forgetfulness of names could not obtain to-day, not 
only because a printed record is in every one’s 
hands, but also for many other reasons. And it is 
not essential or even desirable that names should be 
forgotten, but it is desirable, and it is essential, 


MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 135 


that a near approach to the harmony and self- 
sacrifice of the cathedral-builders shall be made 
if we are to do first-rate decoration. 

And this sacrifice must be shared by all of us. I 
have already once quoted the man who said to me: 
“The trouble with American painters is exactly the 
same as with the business men; they don’t work 
hard enough.” Now our artists, our architects es- 
pecially, do work pretty hard, but perhaps even 
the architects do not always work hard enough at 
mutuality of effort with the sculptors and mural 
painters. This reflection, however, is a boomerang; 
it comes back and hits us mural painters even 
harder than it does the architects, for we mural 
painters certainly lack strenuousness in mutual 
effort; but it hits the architects first. They do not, 
except in rare cases, pay enough of their time and 
thought, which is the same thing as their money, 
to this problem of mutuality with those who work 
under them as decorative sculptors and painters. 

It is hard to solve—this problem—but until it is 
solved we architects, painters, and sculptors shall 
not be solvent ourselves; in questions of decoration 
we shall be always on the brink of bankruptcy. 


IIT 


In discussing the problem of mutuality, let us 
examine somewhat the procedure which has so far 


136 MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 


been followed by our practitioners. I have said at 
the beginning of this chapter that the determination 
of precedence is a troublesome one. To-day two 
artists are often set at work together in one room 
in a way which perhaps does more to retard the 
progress of true decoration than any other half-dozen 
hindrances. Why has this happened? Partly by 
reason of historical and chronological conditions 
which could not be helped and can be only gradually 
adjusted, partly, I think, by the action of architects 
who have not sufficiently studied the situation. 

Let me try to illustrate in detail. It is proba- 
ble that any architect contemplating the decoration 
of his building dreads the changes which his de- 
sign may be forced to undergo when the sculptor 
and painter place their work. He, the architect, 
is commander-in-chief; he knows that well enough, 
and indicates the spots where each bit of sculpture 
or painting shall occur. Nevertheless he is some- 
times a little nervous, and, like a wise architect 
whom I have known, says to himself: “For God’s 
sake don’t let’s have any features,” He very nat- 
urally does not wish to have the design of his 
room, as it were, warped out of shape by a mural — 
painter who should manage to focalize all attention 
upon some prodigious bit of virtuosity either in 
color or handling. The architect’s preoccupation as 
to this is thoroughly artistic. He is wholly right, 
and yet he is often the cause of his own anxiety. 


~MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 137 


He is averse to features, yet frequently has designed 
his room in such a way that features are the only 
thing which the mural painter can put there. 

The architect has made a design for his room, often 
a very beautiful one—marble panels between pilas- 
ters or behind pillars cover the walls; and he says 
to the painter: “I have left a big space in such a 
place (lunette or rectangle, or what may be), which, 
it seems to me, would afford a capital chance for 
-a mural painting.” * The artist is delighted to have 
a panel in so beautiful a room; he paints it, and there 
it is, perforce, afeature! It is the one piece of figure- 
painting in the room; nothing of its own kind leads 
up to it; nothing leads away from it; elsewhere is 
marble, bronze, gilding; in that one spot are figures 
of men and women; no wonder the eye travels 
thither and rests too long, and thus the design of the 
architect is warped, as I said, out of shape. What 
the mural painter who has a true grasp upon his 
task would like is this—he would like to see the 
architect’s sketch for the room as soon as completed, 
and to say to him: “Yes, I should be glad indeed to 
do your big panel; and in the spandrels to some of 
your minor arches, and here and there and else- 
where are places where I should wish to do little 
bits of subsidiary mural painting of figures combined 


“*Tt may be admitted that there are rooms where such focalizing of 
figure-work is permissible and effective, because the function peculiar 
to the place is also focalized by a prescribed arrangement of seats or 
benches, as in a throne-room or court-room for instance. 


138 MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 


with ornament. Thus I would lead the decoration 
down from your big panel into your walls; I would 
marry the large picture to the general character of 
your room, and there should be a whole floreated 
offspring of tiny figures and patterns which should 
in nowise take from the simplicity of your design, 
but from the point of view of mural painting should 
unite its parts and instead of cutting it up should 
make it tell even more as one whole.” 

This is the result which the architect and the really 
skilful mural designer can get if they will work 
together, the architect always leading, the painter 
emphasizing and softening as the former desires, not 
merely enforcing a single focal point of personal 
presentation. 

The conditions under which mural painting has 
been given out and payments have been made have 
had something to do with delaying the conception of 
the room as a whole. In every great building there 
is an immense amount of what is called plain paint- 
ing as distinguished from mural painting. A few of 
the mural painters, having a large staff of men under 
them and a regular plant to draw upon, are able to 
take up great contracts, covering the painting of 
rooms, halls, stairways, corridors—thousands of su- 
perficial yards of wall space. Now plain painting, 
so-called, is much of it not plain at all, but in- 
volves knowledge of, and feeling for ornament and 
color; of course, anybody with muscle and a wide 


MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 139 


brush can do plain painting of a sort, but to carry 
out the scheme of color of a great building in the 
right way demands the possession of a very high 
degree of artistic capacity. Some of our plain paint- 
ers are also accomplished and well-known figure- 
painters, and the public has not appreciated the im- 
portance and difficulty of the problems which many 
of them have met successfully. 

Now, my contention is that in putting two men 
together in one room our first error has been that we 
have not sufficiently considered the importance of 
this so-called plain painting. In saying this I do 
not mean for a moment that we have ranked the 
great central panel too highly; it occupies the first 
place in mural art—vide Giotto, Signorelli, Raphael, 
Michelangelo, Veronese, Rubens. But I do mean 
that we have not given a high enough place to 
the subsidiary painting; vide the work of the men 
who have tied the great panels together in a thou- 
sand palaces and churches of Italy. 

In decoration not half enough consideration is 
accorded to the man to whom we give the mislead- 
ing name of plain painter, the man who supplements 
the creator of so-called mural panels, of subjects; 
the man who carries out minor subjects, perhaps 
purely ornamental; and, above all, who determines 
the general color of the walls which shall harmonize 
the whole room. It is highly important that this 
man shall be an artist of first-rate excellence with 


140 MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 


both mind and feeling; in fact, a man who by in- 
stinct and training is synthetical in a large sense. 
This has not been fully understood. Even recently 
- I have heard talented figure painters, who executed 
fine mural panels, say: “Oh, any man can carry out 
the general scheme of the room.” ‘There never was 
a greater mistake, and few mistakes have bred more 
mischief. To be sure, my interlocutor, the mural 


painter, added, “if he is properly controlled.” But — 


proper control cannot be had without proper sub- 
ordination, and the subordination which is proper 
infers sincere mutuality of effort, which latter again 
cannot exist until proper consideration of the plain 
painter by the architect and the panel-painter is 
obtained. 7 

Where there is lack of consideration some blame 
usually attaches to those on both sides of a question. 
Commerciality of spirit upon the part of the plain 
painter has probably and justly diluted our con- 
sideration for him, for in the present phase of the 
evolution of decorative art he should be valuable to 
us just about in proportion as he is willing to sub- 
ordinate his profits to a thoughtful and, therefore, 
costly (because time-consuming) study of the purely 
artistic side of his problem. But he may reasonably 
insist upon a large financial profit just so long as it 
is almost the only return which an unthinking public, 
and unthinking artist colleagues, admit as legitimate 
to him. 


ae a _ a 


‘[eD- ‘oostouvly ueg 
P10F] sloursy 1g ay. Jo woos Ajsodvy 94? Ul SUOTIeIOD9p vy} jo ouQ ,,‘adoiny,, :waALUaP] LuaaTy 


mowssriutdag Kg pasmporgay 


MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 141 


Frank Millet, for instance, should have been hon- 
ored for some of the general schemes of coloration 
which he carried through great buildings with 
success; but so-called plain painting attracts less 
attention than it deserves. Now and then, when 
an exhibitor of easel pictures is praised highly by 
visitors, and in print, it may be that next door to his 
exhibition some great public building has just been 
opened. The same visitors pour through this build- 
ing; they have admired the little pictures next door, 
and here they admire the mural panels; they do not 
give a thought to the plain painting, although the 
very fact that they do not think about it is negative 
praise which should redound to the credit of the 
artist, since nothing would be more noticeable than 
an unpleasant treatment of the plain painting. 

The negative character of this excellence, you may 
say, partly explains why the plain painter is not bet- 
ter appreciated. But if this explains the neglect 
of the public, it does not justify the same neglect 
in the artist who should, on the other hand, note 
such a situation and call attention to it. I have 
said that some of our artists should have had 
more credit for their so-called plain painting. Mil- 
let’s shoulders, to be sure, were bowed down with 
honors of every kind, offices and medals and orders 
of merit; but not a bit of it all came in return for 
the unselfish way in which he poured his thought, 
his time, and his private fortune into trying to per- 


142, MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 


fect every detail, and not slight one of them in the 
carrying out of his general decorative schemes of 
color. 

I, who have talked to him often and at length 
upon these subjects, confidant of some of his hopes 
and realizations and disappointments, can afarm 
that when we lost him in no way did we lose more 
than in the forfeit of the influence which he would 
have brought to bear upon thoroughness and sacri- 
fice in favor of rounded perfection and the cultiva- 
tion of that spirit of collaboration which only can 
secure such a result. Let the public, the architect, 
and the mural painter give to the plain painter the 
credit due him, and we shall find him, if he be of the 
right stuff, working with the painters of panels in 
such a way that the best shall obtain. 

There is no one thing which will help us so much 
here in America as to arrange our harness in such 
cunning fashion that the handicraftsman and the 
creator of complicated subjects shall pull together 
and side by side. I do not say pull equally. More 
strain came upon Paul Veronese when he painted 
the great “Marriage of Cana” for the refectory of 
San Giorgio than fell upon the men who twined 
scroll work about it or filled ornamental panels; but 
the eventual strain was shared by all, and the train- 
ing of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries so de- 
veloped the garzone di bottega that Verrocchio’s shop- 
boy became da Vinci and Ghirlandajo’s Michelangelo. 


MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 143 


If we are to attain entire success the man who 
thinks out the big central canvas must give sus- 
tained, generous, cordial consideration to the man 
who paints the scrolls; for if we are to be able to 
spell art with a big A we must learn to spell artisan 
in the same way. 


IV 


Now, if thorough consideration for everybody’s 
share in the work is the desideratum, how are we to 
bring it about? ‘Thus far two quite different roads 
have been followed, each good for a certain distance, 
neither leading far enough. At the beginning of one 
road the architect has said to himself: “I am afraid 
of inexperience in my mural painter. I am afraid 
of ‘features’ in my room, afraid of great canvases 
made a theatre of display for virtuosity, and throw- 
ing my ensemble out of balance. I will adhere to 
the methods of the Italian fifteenth century, mak- 
ing such an elaborate decorative distribution of 
geometrical divisions of my walls and ceilings by 
means of carved mouldings and borders that what 
goes within them will pass muster, even if it be rela- 
tively inferior in drawing and painting, and at least 
will not confuse or contradict my design. The art- 
ist shall be prodigal of little figures flat against gold 
or modelled in relief, rich perhaps in color, or it may 
be toned into delicate distinction. By rhythm, en- 


144 MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS — 


richment, and delicate interrelation of parts he shall 
supply the place of creative power. The lesson is 
spread out, for him to learn from, upon palace walls 
of fifteenth-century Italy, in the Schifanoja of Fer- 
rara, the Cambio of Perugia, the Reggia of Mantua, 
and taught by a hundred masters, among whom 
Pinturicchio was really a genius, lavishing orna- 
mental and figure composition upon his walls until 
their mere enrichment by color and line became 
fairly intoxicating.” 

Such a treatment 1s delightful as far as it goes, 
and it goes very far; and furthermore, it is fairly 
safe; for, except where artists of spontaneous and 
personal talent practise it, such decoration is rather 
compilation than creation, and calls for taste rather 
than originality. But it is a road which loses itself, 
is swallowed up, just where the great gates of the 
high Renaissance swing open. Within them it con- 
tinues truly, but only as a delightful ornamental 
border-land to the spacious country in which Gior- 
gione seats his nymphs and Veronese spreads his 
feasts, and over which are banked the clouds in 
whose bosom the goddesses of the Farnesina are 
throned or the angels of Correggio fly. — 

These later creations furnished the matter of the 
great panel, and the great panel came to stay. Once 
created, it was felt to be the completest painted ex- 
pression of any dominant national emotion or hap- 
pening. Events of supreme importance, when cele- 


~MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 145 


brated graphically, were no longer broken up into a 
series of little panels, but were given wide space upon 
the walls throughout the succeeding centuries. It 
was plain, therefore, when we commenced our dec- 
orative practice in America, that, if we wished to 
apotheosize some event, we must give it elbow-room; 
and here began our second and alternate method of 
procedure. 

In his progress along this road the architect se- 
lected an artist to do the big panel, then a decorative 
firm to do the rest. Now it has been shown that, 
unless the architect can give a great deal of time to 
supervision on the spot, this dual responsibility is 
loaded with danger. The peril which menaces the 
result is increased by the architect’s consciousness 
of it. Urged by this consciousness, he says to him- 
self: “A has proved his ability to do a large panel 
well; he shall have free play. But I am not quite 
sure that XYZ & Co., the so-called decorative firm, 
will thoroughly sympathize with the character of 
his work; therefore 1 will minimize their share of it 
by giving them only plain or ornamented surfaces, 
void of figure composition and to be merely colored 
or gilded harmoniously.’ By doing this the archi- 
tect ties his own hands and denies to himself free- 
dom of distribution. The decorative composition 
of a room is of prodigious importance, and to restrict 
figure treatment to one enclosed space is to adopt a 
procrustean method. For, whether we linger with 


146 MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 


Perugino in the minutely subdivided space or pass 
on with Veronese to some huge refectory, where his 
vast banquet fills one end of the sala from pavement 
to ceiling, we have to admit that these old masters— 
both the man who caressed the sequence of little 
panels and the one who threw open the whole room’s 
end to his painting of the sky and the lagoons and 
his parti-colored crowd of Venetians—that each 
artist, I say, kept steadily in view the decorative 
ensemble, the entirety of his room. Perugino in 
the Sala del Cambio never thought that, because he 
had been lavish in quantity and quality of painted 
people and incidents, he could forget the carver 
or inlayer or gilder, and he gave to them also an 
honorable place. Veronese never believed that, be- 
cause he had furnished a spacious scene filled with 
movement and color, he could abandon all the rest 
of his refectory to carver and inlayer and gilder, 
and suppress the figure save in one great panel. 
Each of these two masters felt that he must keep in 
touch with those who treated wood or plaster or 
pavement throughout the room, not stop at enriching 
one spot. So Perugino, providing a profusion of 
little human figures occurring again and again in all 
parts of his scheme, relieved the eye by giving it 
patterns instead of figures, to rest on in other por- 
tions of the walls. Veronese, who had set up one 
great focal group of dominating figures, painted oth- 
ers which should peer out from spandrels or between 


Sulaqseld oyi ul iojap v Ysnosy? peystied ‘suoreio.ap ULIUDWY Jo IsatpIva AIDA dy} Jo aUO ‘UOIURdWOD S}I YITAL YIOA STITT, 


"ACN ‘Aueqry ‘oudes 03¥1g ay. Joy poquregq §,,‘143IN Jo 13 OUT, :LNOP] SIMAO;, WYZTIIAL 


ee os - P ee + 


Oe ee a ee a a es é "J 4 


MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 147 


pilasters, carrying his figure composition throughout 
the room. 

We have then seen the methods by which we have 
thus far tried to blunt the two horns of our dilemma, 
methods of elimination and restriction. One man 
has said: ‘‘Let us give up the big panels altogether 
and confine ourselves to quattro cento practice.” The 
other has replied: “‘No, let us go on to the cinque 
cento and install the big panel, but let us keep down 
the second artist in the room to ‘plain painting’ 
and gilding of ornament, limiting his creative work 
to creation, at best, of harmonies.” 

Still a third man, and I am sorry to say that he is 
sometimes a so-called mural painter, thinks slight- 
ingly of all that does not relate to the figure, says, 
“Anybody can do plain painting,” and wishes to be 
entirely rid of decorative firms as ‘‘commercial.” 
Now some of these propositions seem to me wholly 
wrong, and none of them seems to me wholly right. 
I am optimistic and aggressive enough to believe pro- 
foundly in what is to come. Given the talent, the 
ability, the progressiveness shown upon the walls 
of our picture exhibitions by Americans, men and 
women, sculptors and painters, I am convinced that 
we may yet evolve a very high and perfect form of 
decoration. 

In such an evolution we must have the great figure 
panel because it belongs with every advanced sys- 
tem of decoration, and, on the other hand, we need 


148 MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 


not limit ourselves to a single figure panel in the 
room, restricting all other parts of the said room to 
plain surface or purely ornamental work. In fact, 
if we are to be highly developed we must be equal 
to all the different forms and degrees of decorative 
freedom. | 

Let me try to give examples of the difficulties 
which come up between artists set to work together 
in one room. We will take two men, each highly 
trained along his lines, and for convenience’ sake 
call them Painter and Gilder. 

An architect has included in a public building 
a vast room in which notable functions will oc- 
casionally take place. He wishes to have in this 
room a great focal decorative panel, a big painting. 
He allots this to Painter. There remains to be con- 
sidered the decoration of the rest of the room. 
Instead of giving this to Painter, and enabling him 
to frame his own picture, he turns it over to Gilder, 
thus erecting two heads to the enterprise. To be 
sure, he says: ‘Gilder, I want you to refer to Painter 
in carrying out the decoration of the room; you are 
to consult him, consider his ideas, and echo his panel 
in the subsidiary work.” 

This sounds ideal, but it is not so. To begin 
with, the financial appropriation has been divided 
into two portions, controlled respectively by Painter 
and Gilder, neither of whom has power to exceed 
his allotment. They are two men, not one, and no 


MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 149 


two men can think and plan exactly alike. They 
may work admirably together, but one should be in 
real control. ‘The architect by referring Gilder to 
Painter has only constituted Painter an advisory 
committee of one, not controller. Now an advisory 
committee can only advise, and that is not enough. 

Above all, no man can administer another man’s 
pocketbook, and, therefore, here is what happens: 
Painter works at his main panel with his staff of 
assistants, Gilder at the general decoration with his 
staff. Painter and Gilder are carrying on decora- 
tion in other buildings, and it is difficult for them 
both to stay long in this particular room at the 
same time. 

Gilder’s foreman goes to Painter’s studio and says: 
*“How do you want the toning done all around your 
big panel?”’ Painter tries to tell him, but cannot 
do it as well as he could tell one of his own assistants, 
because he has trained the latter, is intimately ac- 
quainted with their temperaments, and knows just 
how they will interpret his orders and translate his 
ideas into form and color. Gilder’s foreman does 
the work, and Painter is not really satisfied with it. 
The foreman says: “That is how Mr. Painter wanted 
it; that’s what he told me to do.” 

But it has not been done as Painter wished it, 
because he could not superintend Gilder’s staff as he 
might his own. They could not understand him as 
readily or follow him as closely as could his person- 


150 MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 


ally trained men, It is not Gilder’s fault; he is 
perhaps as highly trained as Painter, and is just as 
anxious to have things turn out well. But there 
is a divided responsibility where a single responsibil- 
ity would have been far more effective. The result 
is neither a complete expression of Painter's or of 
Gilder’s personality. On the contrary, it is compli- 
cated by a pulling which is slightly divergent in the 
case of the two principal parties—it is team-work 
without a driver. 

When two men of nearly equal training are ex- 
pected to refer to each other as they work, even their 
good qualities hinder their progress—their delicacy, 
personal and mutual, interferes. Each one dislikes 
to demand too much of the other’s time. Above all, 
he hates to ask the other to do a piece of work over 
again, because in so proceeding he is putting his 
hand directly into the other’s pocket and diminish- 
ing his profit. Gilder is paying his men a large 
sum per day. If, when they have worked for a 
week on a certain wall, Painter wishes the color to 
be two tones deeper, he feels like a robber in asking 
Gilder to undo and do again so much. He even 
may, and sometimes does, meet with this answer 
from Gilder: ““You wish me to repaint the walls, 
but I have nothing to do it with, for I have already 
almost exhausted the appropriation.” In such a 
situation what could one reply? 

Suppose for a moment, and in parenthesis, that — 


MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 151 


about the year 1492 Alexander VI had given Pin- 
turicchio a big lunette, ““The Santa Caterina before 
the Sultan,” for instance, to paint as the impor- 
tant focal point of the room, with an appropria- 
tion of so much money, then had turned over the 
rest of the Sala to another artist who proceeded to 
execute a series of elaborate smaller decorations 
about the big one! When they were all uncovered 
together, suppose Pinturicchio had said to his com- 
rade, “This juxtaposition of tone and color is not 
what I wished; it hurts my work,” and his collabora- 
tor had replied: ‘““The Pope gave me so much money, 
forbidding me to exceed it, and it is nearly gone!” 

How we and others before us for four hundred 
years should have had to suffer for this misunder- 
standing! How we have had to suffer in other cases! 
For they did make mistakes now and again, mistakes 
which we can feel and see. And if errors were made 
even in the relatively homogeneous art of the six- 
teenth century, blunders of scale apparent to-day, 
and, unquestionably, dissonances in color-juxta- 
position which kindly time has since softened into 
agreement, think how much more embarrassing is 
our modern collaboration of men whose study has 
brought them into contact with so many different 
theories and practices! 

But, on the other hand, if there is only one head 
to the enterprise, if Painter or Gilder alone is re- 
sponsible, if it is his financial affair, and his alone, 


152 MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 


he has only himself to blame for his blunder, and 
must at once and cheerfully make up his mind to 
pay for it and do the work over again; whereas, if 
Painter has to ask Gilder to incur loss, or vice versa, 
both are harassed with doubts as to whether the 
mistake might not have been avoided had the first 
suggestions been made effectively. But I have tried 
to show that they could not be made with entire 
effectiveness because Painter was dealing with an- 
other man’s material, not his own, and could not be 
perfectly understood. In decoration a man knows 
beforehand that he is to be occasionally called upon 
to make sacrifices of time and money, either because 
of mistakes or from the need for experiment. Now 
he can do this very well on his own account, but when 
it comes to sacrificing some one else it is a different 
matter. | 

And let us further develop another cogent reason 
(which we have already touched upon in an earlier 
paragraph) for not dividing decorative responsibil- 
ity. In the great room which we have discussed the 
architect pays to Painter so much for his ‘panel, 
to Gilder so much for the general decoration. The 
panel occupies the principal place in the room, but 
there are plain spaces of wall which Painter thinks 
need decoration. Here and there he would like to 
place a figure or a frieze or a bit of spandrel orna- 
ment which should help the big panel down into the 
walls, marry it completely to the room, and make 


ajduiexa snosuesowoy & Sy ‘“spuey UMO II9Y} Jo FIOM 9Y} Iv ssv[s poutejs pue ‘aoatdAouuUTYyS dUO}s ‘suvaq 
-BUI[199 ‘ZUIP|Is ‘SUIAIvD-poOoOM 9y} Inq ‘sjaued [vinW 9y} ATUO JON) ‘s}s!q1v asay} Jo UOT}vaID [euOsied ay} INO 


-Y3no1yi Bulag sv o[quyieues sjoym e& dn ayeu sauof “dD slouvsy pue souof uojog ‘"} jo sjusw sede pure o1pnis ayy, 


ystjJv oy} JO JuoWIede UI UONeIOIIq :SANOf ‘Cd SIONVU] 


MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 153 


the whole a richer, completer, and more significant 
ensemble. Now if the whole sum allotted to Painter 
and Gilder were so much, and if the entire sum were 
paid to one of the two as controller—to Painter, for 
instance—he could at once determine what fraction 
of the amount he would devote to such decorative 
figures as lay outside his panel. 

If, on the other hand, one-third of the total sum 
were allotted to Gilder specifically for plain painting, 
so-called, Painter certainly could not require Gilder 
to do additional costly painting for nothing, nor 
could he afford to divert a portion of his own ap- 
propriation to work which he could not control as to 
its execution. Here is a condition likely seriously to 
hamper successful creation, since it at once narrows 
the scope of free combinations. 


We went just now to Pinturicchio for an exam- 
ple; let us travel backward this time, not quite so 
far nor so long, to Tiepolo, and visit the wonder- 
ful Barbarossa Saal of the Castle at Wiirzburg. If 
the prince bishop had said to the great artist, 
*‘Messer Giovanni Battista, you shall paint me a 
ceiling and two tympana, and Mingozzi Colonna 
shall do everything else,” how much we should have 
lost! What he probably did say was, “Treat such 
and such themes, but arrange the painting as you 
will,” and what the painter thought was, in turn, 
just as probably something like this: “My ceiling 


154 MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 


from its shape and surroundings is likely to resemble 
my ceilings in the Canossa palace and at Stra and 
elsewhere, but up there between windows and tym- 
pana I see a good place for something wholly new.” 
And so, stimulated by the novelty of the situation, 
he spilled out from the corners of his tympana and 
spread along the wall the figures which yield perhaps 
the freshest, certainly the most audacious, motives 
in the room, and which delightfully enhance the en- 
semble. 7 

All these, and the overdoors, too, we should have 
lost had there been dual control and a limitation of 
Tiepolo to his three focal points. 


V 


When I have spoken of our current division of 
responsibility to persons interested in art, they have 
often expressed great surprise that it should ever 
have occurred. They have said with emphasis: “Of 
course, the most highly trained artist should be at 
the head, the painter of the great panel should con- 
trol the plain painter; there is no other way of 
looking at it.” But the history of the movement 
shows that this dual responsibility came about quite 
naturally, and again, although from the ideal point 
of view “there is no other way” than accepting the 
most highly trained artist as controller, in facing 
the actual situation we must qualify our assurance 


MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 155 


not a little, for though we are working toward our 
ideal we have not yet attained it. 

Here is how the dual responsibility grew into being: 
Before the World’s Fair at Chicago and La Farge’s 
work in Boston and New York gave their stimulus 
to decorative art in the United States, the impulse 
toward embellishment had begun to manifest itself 
at least sporadically. No one (for a long time, at 
all events) had planned the systematic decoration 
of any great building, whether capitol or court-house 
or library, but it was evident that if such planning 
should be imminent the staff of creators of the dec- 
oration would have to be drawn from two classes 
of men. One class consisted of the artists who, 
either in America or Paris, had graduated from 
their schools to studios of their own, and were 
painting pictures for the annual Academy or Salon. 
The other class included men who had built up 
in American cities the business of decorative firms. 
They had imported and imitated antique furniture 
and studied styles which they applied to the in- 
teriors of private houses. The founders of these 
businesses often became men of highly trained ar- 
tistic taste with skilled artists, artisans, and me- 
chanics working under them. (I call them artisans 
for convenience’ sake, and apologize in doing so, 
for every artisan should be an artist and every 
artist must be an artisan.) 

There, then, was the material, and when such an 


156 MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 


enterprise as the decoration of the Boston Public 
Library eventuated it was carried out by represent- 
atives of the two classes. | 

Mr. La Farge, the only artist who at that time 
was experienced in the handling of a staff of men, 
was engaged elsewhere. It was certain that Mr. 
Sargent and Mr. Abbey, from their great talent, 
could contribute more capacity for drawing and mod- 
elling the figure and for the conception of large com- 
positions than could the artisan-artists employed by 
_ the firm of XYZ & Company. On the other hand, 
the latter could contribute a knowledge of mechan- 
ical processes, of carving or painting ornament, of 
toning gold, of doing a hundred things in detail 
which Mr. Sargent and Mr. Abbey had never found 
leisure to study. In such a case it was natural and 
desirable, at a time when we were in our beginnings 
as to decoration, that the architect in charge should 
seek out the best figure painters and say to them, 
“Paint me some panels”; to the decorative firms, 
“Do the rest of it.” 

Only natural and desirable, even inevitable at 
that time, yet such procedure was the beginning of a 
condition of things which I earnestly believe must 
now be greatly modified if we would establish a 
first-rate decorative practice in America. Since the 
year 1892 we have learned much, and there is a 
whole group of men who have undertaken and car- 
ried out great decorative enterprises. The Edwin 


— rs S| 
Seah 
; 


MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 157 


Abbey who painted the lunette called ‘‘The Treas- 
ures of the Earth,” in the Harrisburg Capitol, was a 
much greater decorator than the Edwin Abbey who 
drew and colored the delightful panels of the Boston 
Public Library—he had had a score of years in which 
to think and develop. For the same reason Mr. 
Sargent to-day could control every detail of the sur- 
roundings to his decoration with more advantage 
than could any other man. If Abbey were with us 
still, and if he and Mr. Sargent were to decorate 
rooms, their added experience would make it emi- 
nently desirable that no middleman whatever should 
come between them and the architect, save as under 
their complete directoral control. 

The controlling artist should not only paint the 
panels but also (always under the architect) admin- 
ister every inch of the color of the room, determine 
the toning of the plaster or stone, say how much 
gold there should be and of what quality; in fact, 
he should create the frame, which is the room, as well 
as the panels, which, speaking superficially, we may 
call the picture. 

To the man who wishes to eliminate decorative 
firms from large public artistic enterprises because 
the said firms are commercial, we would reply, first, 
that all artists have to earn their living, hence are in 
a sense themselves commercial; secondly, that some 
of the great decorative firms have rendered invaluable 
service to art in America, and have contributed prob- 


158 MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 


ably more than any one artist toward making an ar- 
tistic background for daily life in our private houses 
at least; thirdly, that the experience acquired by the 
carvers, gilders, painters of ornament, etc., in the em- 
ployment of these firms can be of the very greatest 
possible use to artists unconnected with any such 
houses, but who happen for the time to be in control 
of great artistic enterprises. The men who are at the 
head of these firms, as we have said before, have at- 
tained their position because of natural inclination or 
inherited tendency; in some cases they are, like Mr. 
Tiffany, brilliant artists who have rendered great 
original service. Even setting aside so exceptional a 
case as his, such men are at least trained experts, 
proud of their success and eager for recognition. 
Upon the purely commercial side of their business 
the artist who is decorating a room need not approach 
them. Some few among them may inject pure com- 
merciality into all that they do. Such men should 
be fought to a finish and compelled to respect the 
professional ethics of the artistic societies. The ma- 
jority of men are sound, and the majority of dec- 
orative firms, I fully believe, if given generous rec- 
ognition would give generous service in return to 
the common cause. At all events, I should be very 
willing to make occasionally the experiment of being 
put under the yoke with such men. When I paint 
the principal motive in a large room while some 
well-known firm does the rest of the decoration, if 


Cartes R. Lams: Dome in Memorial Chapel, Minneapolis, Minn., 
executed in mosaic 


, 
Sy 


oes: 


re gs "3 


Se ear hal ee “ - 


MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 159 


we make a mess of it it is because we did not begin 
soon enough to compare what we were doing or suf- 
ficiently consider each other’s temperaments at the 
beginning of the undertaking. 

If the mural painter can go early enough to the 
workshop of the decorative firm, and if his assistants, 


‘men who understand him and his wishes thoroughly, 


can go there often enough and be sure of a respect- 
ful hearing, we shall have a good result. Or if 
exactly the reverse obtains, and the head of the 
decorative firm comes to the painter and sends his 
executants to him freely and frequently, the same 
fortunate outcome may obtain. 

You may say that it will be very difficult for sev- 
eral men, one the mural painter, another the so- 
called decorator, still others their assistants, to carry 
out one room successfully. Yes, it will be very dif- 
ficult, it will involve mutuality of experience, knowl- 
edge, taste, above all, mutuality of sacrifice, but it 
will be possible, and it is the only way possible, and 
it will be worth the sacrifice. To the sceptic we 
will cite the condemnation passed upon our archi- 
tecture but a few years ago. People said it was all 
copy, all taken from the past; to-day the walls of 
the exhibition of the Architectural League are cov- 
ered with photographs of works which, evolved from 
the creation of the past and the needs of the pres- 
ent, are fresh, original, stimulating, beautiful, and 
American. 


160 MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 


Sculpture is following closely in the wake of archi- 
tecture; chronologically, painting has always come 
a little later than the other two, and mural paint- 
ing is already standing on the threshold. She only 
wants to be entreated in the right way. Given sin- 
cerity and enthusiasm, which we have, mutuality, 
which we may have, patience, which we must have, 
the future will be big with event. 

The very greatest result in art (in decoration as 
in other branches) can ultimately come only from 
him who has the divine afflatus, for not all the 
mutual effort of twenty Peruginos working consci- 
entiously together could produce a Michelangelo. 
But under the commander-in-chief, be he, according 
to the problem, architect, sculptor, or painter, the 
success of the enterprise will rest upon team-work, 
and it is upon the training of these team-workers 
that we have to rely. For we must have many 
brains and many hands to work for us toward the 
creation of our building; and, to be paradoxical, the 
individuality of the great decorated building de- 
pends largely on homogeneousness. It is the result of 
minds working in a subordination at times almost 
hierarchical; all these minds converge upon one ef- 
fect, the effect planned by the master mind of the 
creator, who is, or should be, the architect. 

In any ideal procedure the architects, sculptors, 
painters, glass-makers, and all the rest constantly 
confer, watch each other, dovetail their work, sound 


MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 161 


their notes together, as it were, to see if they accord. 
Their task is antipodal to that of the easel painter. 
The latter would resent a brush stroke from an out- 
sider; he preserves his individuality as jealously as 
if he were a competitor en loge. The man who is 
taking a hand in the decoration of a great building 
acts otherwise. He may have planned a great pic- 
tured pavement like that of Siena; he cannot lay 
it. He may have designed a great window and 
sedulously calculated the effect of his leads, but he 
does not set the glass or fit the leads; it would be a 
waste of time. And so it is with the painter of a 
great mural panel; it would be folly for him to 
consume his hours in going over vast stretches of 
canvas with paint. Once he has found his design, 
his shapes, his colors, his values, his assistants may 
put them upon the canvas for him, and when they 
have reached a certain point he too plunges into the 
thick of the fight and works with them, elbow to 
elbow. And if he is wise he will associate these 
assistants so closely with him that their enthusiasm 
and their temperaments are associated as well, until 
they become, not merely helpers, but part creators, 
who in time shall grow into individual leaders. 

For although fitting and soldering and all mechan- 
ical work must be well done, above these fitters of 
joints and between them and their leader must come 
many kinds of men, and above all others and close 
to the head must be his chosen and trained assist- 


162 MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 


ants, his chiefs of the different departments of the 
staff. 

For the development of these leaders we have that 
most sorely needed of all our art institutions, the 
School of Rome. Upon the top of Mount Janicu- 
lum, whence the students can look down upon a city 
which has been overwritten, like a palimpsest, with 
the records of the culture of twenty centuries, we 
hope to cloister a growth which, matured, shall 
spread over America. I believe that there is no 
brighter spot on the horizon, no greater encourage- 
ment for him who cares for the future of American 
art, no institution more deserving the indorsement, 
backing, and active financial assistance of all who 
believe in the higher education than this same School 
of Rome. It is there that im time we shall all seek 
for our assistants of the day, who shall become 
leaders of the morrow, for our Perino del Vaga or 
our Giovanni da Udine, our garzone di bottega, who 
(as I have said before), beginning as Ghirlandajo’s 
shop-boy, became a towering master. 

You smile at my thinking that Americans may 
emulate “the hand that rounded Peter’s dome.” 
Michelangelo did his best as a giant in a great age. 
If American artists learn to do their best, at least 
their relation to their time will be unimpeachable. As 
for our time, no less an authority than Rodin says 
that we in America are upon the edge of a renais- 
sance whose importance we can hardly calculate. 


MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 163 


To the advocate of individuality ad outrance who 
says that all decoration is only compilation because 
it is the work of more than one hand and mind, we 
reply that curiously but undeniably the decorators 
who have had most assistants have been among the 
artists endowed with the most prodigious person- 
ality. Pinturicchio’s Borgia rooms were produced 
by an army of assistants; but are they not different 
from any others? The ceilings of Veronese’s pupils 
cannot always be certainly distinguished from those 
of the master; but do they not proclaim the names 
of Venice and of Paolo Cagliari as with a trumpet? 

Rubens is the archetype of the man who made 
great pictures with other men’s hands, but is any 
personality more colossal than that which could 
influence schools of north and south, could pass 
down the sceptre through the hands of Vandyck to 
Gainsborough and all sorts of lesser men, who could 
open the way in fact to modern art? Some later 
critics have spoken easily of Raphael as without 
personality because he accepted the ideas of others, 
but is there any more varied and sustained person- 
ality than Raphael’s in arrangement and composi- 
tion—those all-important elements of decoration? 

Composition is combination; Raphael combined 
what he saw in men and women, books and pictures, 
and after they had passed through his brain they 
were quite sufficiently alembicated. So much for 
some of the famous and successful team-workers of 


1644 MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 


the past; may they not stand comparison respect- 
ably with the most individual of artists? And so in 
the future the successful creators of public buildings 
in our national architecture shall be those who have 
the power at once to imagine and to control them- 
selves and others, and who shall stand fully armed 
with inventiveness and receptiveness in either hand. 


VI 


At the present moment the decorator in America, 
and, we may affirm, in every other country as well, 
has before him one problem far more immediate and 
troublesome than any other, the problem of finding 
at his hand a body of men able and willing to weave, 
one might say, the ornamental frame of a decorative 
system, while he, the master, puts on the main motive; 
or, in plainer English, young assistants who are ca- 
pable of painting with surety, swiftness, delicacy, 
and vigor the ornamental forms, vegetable or ani- 
mal, or simply geometrical patterns, which in all 
ages have surrounded, supported, and based the 
panels executed by the masters of the figure, whether 
in painting or sculpture. These panels have been 
usually denominated more important than the rest 
of the decoration, and they are so; they are more 
focal, and their organization is of a higher and more 
exacting character, but without the support fur- 
nished by the ornamentalist they would be lonely, 


MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 165 


and the ensemble of the room would seem decora- 
tively thin and bleak. And exactly here is to be 
found the weakness of the present day situation. 
When Raphael designed decoratively magnificent 
human bodies and wanted assistants who should 
keep up with him as he worked, and more than 
keep up, indeed, in creating huge families of babies 
and nereids and tritons, semihuman menageries of 
satyrs and harpies and mermaids, and Armida’s 
gardens of fantastic plant life, of scrolls that battled 
with each other, being tipped with torsos armed 
with club or dagger, of flowers blossoming into 
emergent figures; when he needed such assistants, 
I say, he found them ready at hand. They had 
come down the ages, working always at just such 
problems; under the eaves of Greek or Roman tem- 
ples, chiselling at the cornice; setting the tessere 
of glass or stone in Byzantine cupolas; hacking 
out uncouth Romanesque monsters and_ braiding 
stone into stone. And until the sixteenth century 
they had been very close to the master, so close 
indeed that their names were exchangeable with his 
in the cathedrals of the north. But with Raphael 
and his contemporaries the master began to tower 
and to specialize, while followed and surrounded by 
scores of pupils. More and more his part of the 
decoration began to be of paramount interest to the 
client; more and more the framing became a mere 
matter of course, a compilation, a heaping together 


166 MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 


by men who now had within easy reach such an 
exhaustless cornucopia of material invented in a 
more creative past that they had only to dip care- 
less hands into the medley and apply what they 
brought out with more or less of taste. And it soon 
became less rather than more. Even so early as 
with the Caracci, although there still remained 
enough of the grand souffle to remind us of the ro- 
bust health of a more serene time, there began a 
heaping up of motive which cloyed and irritated 
even where it amused. 

Take, for instance, Annibale’s Jupiter and Juno 
in his famous series in Jacopo della Porta’s great 
gallery of Paul III’s palace. The goddess is still 
delightful, in a sort of post-Farnesina fashion, but 
the Olympian couple has to be surrounded by grad- — 
uated giants, heroic, academic, of all sizes, and 
pushing themselves into every possible coign of van- 
tage, as if the artist had said: “Only see how I can 
draw muscles and vary postures, and just realize 
how clever I am at squeezing in more and more 
figures.” | 

This facile cleverness increased at the expense o 
seriousness. With Annibale Caracci there remained 
still much of the grand style, but already the sep- 
aration was widening between the master who made 
carefully considered studies for his figures and the 
man who composed frames for the same. peat’ 

And it widened more and more. Ghirlandajo’s 


by Joseph Lauber 


Copyright, 1911, 


First 


in the 


Window 


Montclair 


29 


“The Pilgrimage of Life. 


Congregational Church 


UBER: 


JosepH La 


N. J. 


? 


? 


ae 


~ 


i 
‘oud’ 
" 
i & 
A 


“h ok hee deed 


Boras vp 
= 


* 


MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 167 


garzone di bottega took from his master’s hands the 
drawings for figures and painted them under the 
master’s eyes on some chest front or cupboard 
~ panels, where the master himself retouched them. 
Here, then, was a carved wood sofa, made through- 
out in Ghirlandajo’s shop, by himself and young 
assistants, who might afterwards become famous 
painters and sculptors. But later, as the years 
went on, the ornamentalist moved his shop to the 
other side of the way and sold his own sofas, and if 
he became a master, he was a master of sofas and 
chairs, and designs for chintz bed-hangings and 
boudoirs. And all this was admirable except the 
separation. To the new development we owe the 
Adams and Chippendales, and the hundred French 
masters of dainty decorative detail, for if the great 
rooms of Fontainebleau were unreproducible, ele- 
-gance had become almost universal in the pal- 
aces of eighteenth-century France, and the Galerie 
d’Apollon, for instance, is a superb example of dec- 
oration created, in part at least, in very late times 
indeed. 

But a line of purely artificial cleavage had been 
created between so-called artist and so-called arti- 
san—as if a man who loved and felt line and mass, 
style, and color, could ever be anything Dut an artist. 
Every branch of art was still respected; but in 1780 
the engravers on copper who frequented the apart- 
ment of Madame Roland’s father were a good deal 


168 MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 


further removed from the premier architecte du rot 
than was Cellini from Michelangelo. And if such 
separation existed in a great art centre in 1780, by 
1860 and in America there was practically extinc- 
tion of one end of the line, for, as we have said be- 
fore, in “medieval New York” the fresco-painter 
lived in the vestibule between front door and storm- 
door from the beginning to the end of his career. 

And now after this decline of the artist-artisan, 
we have to get back again somewhere near to the 
situation as it was in the best days of decoration. 
For several years we have been on the upward 
trend; highly skilled artisan-artists are now to be 
found in America in the employment of decorative 
firms whose names are a credit to our country, and 
are known abroad as well as at home. But these 
artisans are not accessible to our individual painters 
unless their commission happens to come through 
some particular business house. A few, a very few, 
men have been struggling valiantly and success- 
fully at general interior schemes of decoration, and 
have been creating little bands of skilled assistants 
of their own. But there are not enough of these to 
go around, and here is the crying need of decorative 
art in America. 

As soon as a large body of truly accomplished 
ornamentalists has been created, just so soon will 
such figure-painters as are by temperament and 
training true designers, be able to handle currently 


MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 169 


important decorative schemes. We have a few now 
who can do so, but we should have many. When a 
dozen cities at a time inaugurate such schemes as 
they will by and by, then fifty designers and five 
hundred ornamentalists will have their hands full. 
And it seems as if this problem were at last to find 
its solution through the initiation of the Society 
of Beaux Arts Architects, and as if the capstone 
would be set upon this achievement by the in- 
stitution of the American Academy of Fine Arts in 
~ Rome. 

The Beaux Arts Architects have with extraordi- 
nary enthusiasm, replied to by extraordinary suc- 
cess, set on foot an “Atelier System” of competitions 
through which beginners in architectural design 
shall be trained; the National Sculpture Society 
and the Society of Mural Painters are following suit; 
and to the flower of the young men thus trained, 
the Academy of Rome opens its competitions and 
fellowships, offering the opportunity of three years 
of harmonious, united collaboration between archi- 
tect, sculptor, and painter, in the city which can 
unroll before their eyes the most uninterrupted suc- 
cession of masterpieces. 

Here surely at last will be the corpus of trained 
material which shall permit each artist, under the 
architect, wholly to carry out his scheme—not con- 
duct it a certain distance only to place it in the 
hands of another who shall piece it out. Thus at 


170 MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 


last each man will be able to solve his own problem, 
keeping in respectful consideration the problem of 
the man at his elbow, and not infringing; but being 
forever freed from the necessity of accepting re- 
sponsibility from any one save from him who is 
distinctly his ranking officer. And finally, through 
this development, the man who has had nothing 
but his personal equipment to count upon can find 
a collateral equipment made to his hand, ready to 
be used by and under him. Mutuality of compre- 
hension and effort will still be infinitely helpful, — 
because one man’s area of work will border an- 
other’s, but dual control will cease; and when A 
has painted his panel he will not be obliged to 
hand it over to B to give it a background, but will 
himself control clever hands, which shall surround 
it with its definitive setting. 

A few men have already learned to control each his 
own staff of artisans. To them we must be grate- 
ful indeed for what they have done, and to them we 
must confidently appeal for help to widen the cir- 
cle. And they will not lose by such promoting of 
knowledge; they will gain, for with acquired surety 
of greater excellence will come greater confidence 
on the part of the architects and such a widening of 
the field of opportunity as we do not yet realize. 
For indeed if this field is rightly cultivated, no one 
to-day can foresee how great its yield may be. We 
have almost unlimited territory, almost unlimited — 


saouapisal ajeAlid 0} parjdde uoneiooap jo ajduexy 


hen ‘AURQIY ‘Apelg 'N Auoyluy 
938] 24} JO sdUspIsol oy} jo [Tey uoNdases ut uole1od.ep Jourd Tetqusy  ,,“eURIC JO Uspley oy], MOT ‘PY TIA 


MUTUALITY OF MURAL PAINTERS 171 


wealth, and there surely has been no such oppor- 
tunity since the Renaissance. 

This chapter upon Mutuality has been necessarily 
long and complicated by so much explanatory detail 
that a short resumé of desiderata seems necessary. 
These reduced to their lowest terms would seem to 
be: First, that one painter (under the architect) 
should be in actual not nominal control of the col- 
oring of the room and of the sum of money appro- 
priated to execute the same; and that he should be 
responsible for the result. It might be Mr. Painter 
or it might be Mr. Gilder, but he should control, 
and he should be responsible for the result. 

Second, that as soon as the architect’s drawing 
is done, the painter (and sculptor too) should see it 
and decide (under the architect) just how much or 
how little, how rich or how severe, mural painting 
_and sculpture should be placed upon the walls. 

Third, that all having been planned as far as pos- 
sible at the inception of the work, in the carrying 
out of the latter the architect should insist that the 
painter keep in close and constant touch with all his 
collaborators in the room, whether practitioners of 
the major or the minor arts. 


VII 
SIGNIFICANCE IN MURAL PAINTING 


VII 
SIGNIFICANCE IN MURAL PAINTING 


I 


A CONSIDERATION of the first importance in mural 
painting is subject, or what I should prefer to call 
significance. And here at once we have to break a 
lance with those who make the usual attack in their 
catch-phrase: ‘Art for art’s sake.’”’ Good art is al- 
ways art for its own sake, and often for the sake of 
much beside. If you begin to value it for its limi- 
tatious, you are in danger. Cloistered growth is 
precious, but once matured let it come forth and 
spread and climb and cover the cathedral front. 

It is true that in a decoration, pattern should ap- 
peal first of all—pattern and color and style—and 
to some extent this applies to every good picture, 
decoration or not. The sensitive observer quite 
forgets subject in undergoing the first delightful 
shock of a beautiful piece of work. Indeed, I will go 
so far as to say that a decoration is not thoroughly 
good unless it would look well upside down just as 
pattern; but besides having pattern, color, style, the 
decoration in a building which belongs to the public 

175 


176 SIGNIFICANCE IN 


must speak to the people—to the man in the street. 
It must embody thought and significance, and that 
so plainly that he who runs may read. 

Literary art is a bogie phrase. The oft-quoted 
Frith’s “Railway Station” or “Derby Day” is not 
literary art, but trivial incident rather. To the world 
and in the past the art which we call literary has 
been the art of the ages telling stories to a series of 
listening generations, of heathen myth and Christian 
legend; of Greek masters showing how Theseus 
quarrelled with the centaurs at supper; of Botticelli 
and his pupils rehearsing the tales of Lucian or 
Boccaccio; of Raphael telling Bible stories in woven 
silk; of Michelangelo unrolling upon the Sistine 
vaulting, to the accompaniment of the thunder and 
lightning of his own mighty inspiration, the whole 
story of man’s birth and fall and redemption. 

It is true that these were not new stories; the 
spectator was acquainted with them already so that 
he could pay due attention to painting and drawing 
and modelling. He was not entangled by the com- 
plicated or set guessing by the recondite, and he was 
able to give his thought as much to the manner as 
to the matter. But they were stories, graphic pres- 
entations of traditions which lay close to the roots 
of the race, memories of storms which had rocked 
its cradle, milestones and millennial-stones of its 
evolution. The very fact that all this story was 
familiar proved how man had clung to the tell- 


AW) YOR AON 


‘satqoloog SULOaUIZUy oY Jo Alviqi] oy} JOJ BuNutIed [einpY , “SULIDDUIZU,, :HSUVJ, VNVC] Cau J 


¢ 


ysevyy vung pat-y fq ‘orbr ‘gusithgon 


Ip, 


MURAL PAINTING 177 


ing. The opponent of so-called literary art will 
have a bad time to-day if he will honestly consider 
his position in detail. What is Greek vase-paint- 
ing? Story-telling. What do the walls of Egypt tell 
us? The same stories of a hundred deities ten thou- 
sand times repeated. What is the graphic art of 
the Roman Empire? The story of the divinized com- 
monwealth and of the imperial houses. What were 
_the beautifully simple and prototypically artistic fres- 
coes of the Italian trecento? Stories, stories, stories! 
It was as dramaturgist that Giotto leaped at a 
bound into the heart of the century, and so afirmed 
himself there that for a hundred years no one could 
succeed him. With Giotto, Madonna and the 
Baby, St. Joseph and the Angels, and the rest 
ceased to be merely beautiful decorative spots on 
the walls, and the delighted spectator, instead of 
taking them upon faith as traditions only, could 
actually make out what they were doing! 

What are the frescoes of the fifteenth century? 
Stories, incidentally stuffed with portraits. What 
the great canvases of the Venetians? Stories, inter- 
twisted, Biblical and mythological. What the cycles 
of Tintoretto? Stories which are often poems (and 
if you say to me that Tintoretto is loveliest when a 
lyric poet, I answer: granted, but he is epic in most 
of his work). What is Rembrandt? A dreamer of 
dreams. Rubens? A rehearser of pageants. They 
are story-tellers, both of them. 


178 SIGNIFICANCE IN 


Say, if you will, that there is no art but portrait 
or landscape painting—that at least is a position; but 
if you are not careful, and if you begin to study the 
character of your sitter or the character of nature, 
there you are again upon the edge of story-telling. 
In fact, you can no more draw a line between lit- 
erary and non-literary art than you can make a 
rule for the imitation or non-imitation of nature. 
Indeed, it would seem rather that we have not told 
our story intensely enough. It is, perhaps, more the 
superficiality of our speech than its literary quality 
that weakens it. 

The distinctions which the purist makes are cu- 
riously indicative of his bias. If we are shown a 
drawing by Millet of a girl in a pool of water, the 
purist accepts it at once as artistic, not literary; if 
Rembrandt has called a nude figure Bathsheba, 
that passes also as tolerable in a remote seventeenth 
century; but if you adopt the same label to-day it 
would be, in the opinion of many, an undignified 
concession. And indeed it probably would be un- 
dignified because perfunctorily and carelessly chosen. 
If the water in Rembrandt’s pools of Siloam or 
Bethesda, or what not, came out of Dutch canals, 
Rembrandt’s feeling was saturated with the sense of 
Holy Writ, whereas a man painting for the Salon 
to-day would name his Bathsheba thoughtlessly, and 
might probably find a more fitting title. And this 
helps my contention instead of hurting it, for truly 


fon ee 


MURAL PAINTING 179 


I believe that we are too little rather than too much 
concerned with significance. 

But whatever we may think about the easel pic- 
ture there is no room for doubt regarding the mural 
decoration of a public building. A public decora- 
tion is sure to be in part, at any rate, a commemo- 


ration; in the public building the community cele- 


brates itself and is preached to; meaning it wants, 
and meaning of the highest. If the commissioners 
of a State capitol came to a mural painter it would be 
preposterous for him to say to them: “Beauty is all 
that you require in your rooms—beauty of pattern 
and line, color and figures.” They would reply: 
“We have suffered and fought in the cause of prog- 
ress and civilization; remind us of it upon our walls. 
We have bred heroes; celebrate them.”’ 

When [I received a commission to paint in the 
new court-house of Baltimore, several gentlemen in 
that city invited me to dine with them to consider 
the subject to be undertaken, and I was impressed 
by the variety and importance of their souvenirs. 
One recalled his grandfather’s revolutionary mem- 
ories; a second had sat by Peter Cooper during the 
first railway ride made in America; a third, President 
Gilman, of Johns Hopkins, said: “‘I have seen three 
of the greatest living European scientists literally 
on their knees before the lines ruled upon glass by 
one of our professors.” So they went on telling of 
one and another achievement meet for celebration, 


180 SIGNIFICANCE IN 


and finally decided that the resignation of his com- 
mission as commander-in-chief by Washington at 
Annapolis was their “great central act of equity,” 
best worth commemorating in the history of Mary- 
land. Not every State has so deep and so full a 
background as that historic commonwealth; never- 
theless, wherever the decorator might go, up and 
down these United States, he would find something 
to commemorate. We have to celebrate the con- 
quest of a continent by the plough. Our great in- 
ternecine quarrel has been gloriously rounded by 
reconciliation into a subject for commemoration by 
both North and South. We can tell upon our walls 
of invention, achievement, growth of many kinds. 
We have enough to relate to justify study of all the 
methods of pictorial commemoration in the past, 
and I am convinced that methods, new to some ex- 
tent, modified certainly, will be found to meet new 
needs. 


Il 


Artists naturally vary in their bias, their sym- 
pathies, but if they will attentively study the ques- 
tion of the decoration of public buildings, they will 
find it an astonishingly inclusive one, and discover 
that nearly every form of art may contribute to the 
evolution of a national or municipal monument. 

Probably the masters of the Italian Renaissance, 
who studied both antiquity and the trecento, have 


MURAL PAINTING 181 


prescribed to all time the decorative formula for 
some of the most important and what we may per- 
haps call most architectural parts of a public build- 
ing. It is a formula within which wide liberty is 
possible, as wide indeed as is the gamut run from 
Giotto through Masaccio to Raphael, even to Vero- 
nese and his late descendant Tiepolo. It is the 
kind of art, the system if you will, which is account- 
able for such things as Raphael’s “Jurisprudence,” 
Michelangelo’s “Sibyls and Prophets,’ for those 
arrangements which are apt to be symbolical and 
are certain to be architectonic. It is the form of 
decoration which Mr. Kenyon Cox has so illumi- 
natingly advocated in his book on the classic spirit. 

Although I enthusiastically follow Mr. Cox in his 
love for this side of art, I believe that a more vivid 
and appealing form will be that which directly cele- 
brates the happenings and the people of the city, 
county, or State for which the building stands. This 
is only natural and human, and the more our ap- 
peal is directed toward this humanity the sooner 
will decoration strike deep root in America. 

Our native schools of art have produced talent 
of a high order devoted to portrait and landscape; 
but it has not yet been recognized, because so little 
really serious consideration has been given to a defi- 
nition of mural painting that the latter should in- 
clude within its scope both the portrait and the 
landscape. We have mentioned in a foregoing pas- 


182 SIGNIFICANCE IN 


sage a decorated room which was spoiled by the in- 
troduction of portraits. It was the improper method 
of their introduction which did the mischief. Por- 
traits properly introduced should be among the 
most valuable assets of the architect and painter. 
Historic celebration, whether local or national, im- 
poses them, and they are intrinsically dignified. A 
hall of portraits where the latter are suitably pan- 
elled into handsome walls should be an indispen- 
sable adjunct of every great public building, but 
to box these portraits into heavy frames and scatter 
them about is utterly to misunderstand their deco- 
rative purpose and availability. To see how ad- 
mirably portraiture can be combined with pictorial 
and sculptural decoration of an ideal or symbolic 
character we have only to enter the Galerie d’ Apollon 
of the Louvre, one of the most beautiful rooms in 
the world, and equally dependent upon many dif- 
ferent elements of beauty. 

From the comprehension of the use of the por- 
trait in decoration to the use of landscape is only 
another step. Celebration of the beauty of our na- 
tional or local scenery in State capitols and town 
halls is as suitable as celebration of men and actions. 
In the sixteenth century we find wall-pictures of 
Tuscan cities painted at the initiative of a Medici, 
and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 
famous towns and ports of France appear upon the 
walls by royal order. To-day you may see many 


Greorce W. Maynarnp: Ceiling, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C. 


Example of the use of decorative figures and pure ornament in nearly equal proportions 


MURAL PAINTING 183 


mural paintings of like character in the council- 
houses of Germany, and they are peculiarly fitted 
to the great railway stations and post-offices. 

Not very many years ago in America a feeling 
existed that the success of the mural painter was 
somewhat antagonistic to that of the genre-painter, 
the landscape-painter, the portrait-painter. Other 
artists sometimes felt that the mural painter cov- 
ered space which might well be given to works of 
minor size. It has since been realized that there 
never was a more complete mistake,’ for it is un- 
likely that one square yard of wall surface has been 
taken by the mural painter from his comrades who 
practise other branches of art. Commercialism has 
again and again taken such walls and covered them 
with costly textiles or marbles, but it would be dif- 
ficult to find a case where there has been an impor- 
tant sacrifice to mural painting. We shall do well 
‘to recognize as soon as possible that the wall is the 
natural place for painting, and that painting is of 
all things the most appropriate decoration for a 
wall, because it is of all systems of decoration the 
most easily varied and the most susceptible of a 
high development. A painting is not a thing to be 
fastened on a hat or worn like a sword-hilt. It is 
a fixed and permanent ornament, and the only argu- 
ment in favor of hanging it up in little boxes in our 
private houses is that in our young civilization we 
change even our walls very often. Where the wall is 


184 SIGNIFICANCE IN 


to be reasonably permanent, as in our public build- 
ings, there it should be planned for the painting, 
and the painting planned for it, so that landscape- 
painter and portrait-painter may become mural 
painters side by side with those who now bear that 
especial designation and are members of that spe- 
cial guild. 

For thousands of years all painting was mural, 
and when the artist executed any other sort of 
pictorial work it was solely and wholly because he 
wished it to be easily transportable. From Giotto 
to Giorgione, the Italian masters painted little pan- 
els for chest-fronts or cupboards, and others which 
set under gilded Gothic canopies and pinnacles or 
between Renaissance pilasters could be easily moved 
about from oratory to bedhead. But the large 
altar-piece, even if for convenience it were executed 
on panel in the studio, once carried to church or 
chapel was firmly fastened to its definitive place, 
and became almost as much a part of the wall as 
if it were a fresco, while its projecting frame of 
carved wood or marble, the only thing about the 
altar-piece which in any way differentiated it from 
an out-and-out mural painting, was carefully planned 
and designed to fit its place and harmonize with its 
surroundings. 

The picture-gallery is an established modern in- 
stitution; of that there is no doubt, and it will endure. 
Nevertheless, it points the moral which I am trying 


MURAL PAINTING 185 


to enforce. Witness the action of the harassed mem- 
ber of a hanging committee who does his utmost 
to get away from the cancelling effect of crowded 
juxtaposition and tries his best to space his pictures 
and compose them decoratively. In other words, 
he endeavors by the distribution and composition 
of his sizes, shapes, tones, and colors to make his 
wall as much as possible like one which an architect 
would consider a decorative element of a great room. 
Such action is enough to prove my point, and it is 
certain that landscape and portrait can find their 
place, and to their own great advantage, in a highly 
developed system of decoration. 

Certain catch-phrases are frequently used by those 
who would argue for or against changes. One of 
these is: ““You must keep your wall flat.”” It is not 
unlikely that some one might employ it in disputing 
my proposition, saying, “If you are going to paint 
landscapes and portraits, do you not run the risk 
of making holes in your wall? Would you not be 
compelled to adopt a certain decorative treatment 
in your landscapes?”’ ‘To this the reply is that all 
art is a convention, and that no matter what you 
paint you have to take into consideration conditions 
of one kind or another. If you go out-of-doors and 
paint a dozen different landscapes, looked at ever 
so objectively, you would be confronted by certain 
new conditions the moment you brought your can- 
vases into the house, and, governed by these, you 


186 SIGNIFICANCE IN 


would seek the best light to place them in, the best 
color and tone of background to set them against. 
If such is the case, why not go further if you have 
a room to decorate with landscapes and deliberately 
accord to them something of the so-called decorative 
treatment? The figure-painter often wears chains 
of this kind with advantage; if so, may not the land- 
scape-painter as well? As for the portrait, prop- 
erly panelled into the right sort of wall covering, 
it would look well almost anywhere. Flatness is 
called decorative; yet it is not always the highest 
of decorative qualities. Melozzo da Forli’s portrait 
of Platina in the Vatican offers an ideal example 
of decorative flatness, yet Velasquez’s “Innocent 
Tenth” (which is not at all flat) panelled into good 
woodwork or the right kind of marble would make 
a still better decoration. 

In a word, there is no objection to having a spot 
on your wall provided you build up to it gradually 
or lead the eye away from it so gently that it for- 
gets to note it as a spot. 


ITI 


A hundred of the greatest masters in the past have 
believed in significance and wrought it into their 
work, and a thousand other lesser masters have fol- 
lowed in their footsteps. 

Is it to be reserved for Americans to declare that, 


x 


En Te eee 


MURAL PAINTING 187 


like the prince in “Much Ado about Nothing,” 
we are too fine for daily wear of significance? If 
the high thinkers are to espouse and accept for lord 
and master only the art which eschews significance 
as too disturbing, will not the rest of us, the great 
public, like Beatrice in the play, be obliged “to have 
another husband for working-days”? May not 
some one in the future suggest that we were rather 
too threadbare than too fine for daily wear, and that 
what compelled our lack of significance was just 
simply poverty of invention? 

Some such suspicion might be born and disturb 
us both as artists and patriotic Americans were it 
not dissipated absolutely by one really comprehen- 
sive glance over the field of American art. Right at 
the side of our painters and at least abreast of them 
stand the American illustrators, at once virile and 
significant in their art. If the illustrators can com- 
pass this double forcibleness, cannot the painters 
learn to doit? Is there anything in color to make 
it an inevitable solvent of such a bond? To me 
there are few things more preposterous, or more 
hurtful to American art, than the imaginary line of 
cleavage which has been established between the 
illustrator and the easel painter and between them 
both and the mural painter. 

To each of the three branches of art certain rules 
of technical procedure are special, but if I may be 
allowed to pun upon words these are only the twigs 


188 SIGNIFICANCE IN 


upon the branches; the vital sap is in their message 
to the world, and significance belongs to all of the 
three alike and may not be forfeited by one of them 
Save at grave cost. If an enlightened foreigner 
came to America to weigh our art I would take him 
to the illustrators, with pride in the fact that in 
them he would find full measure of all-round capacity 
based upon well-laid foundations, a rich and varied 
technic, a mastery of means which had not been 
paid for by any lack of significance. 

The easel painters and mural painters and illus- 
trators need each other; especially do the two for- 
mer classes need the latter; the gradual infiltration 
of fundamental ideas from one class into another 
would be infinitely helpful to American art, and 
would bring about the constitution of exhibitions in 
regard to which the critic could no longer say: “Here 
is skill without originality; here is brilliancy with- 
out invention.” 

The more one thinks of it the more one is aston- 
ished that meaning, so delightful to-day in illustra- 
tion, so delightful four hundred years ago in fresco 
and painting, should now be taboo before the gate- 
keeper of an exhibition of current art work. 

Some one may say: if it is valuable, how does it 
happen that subject, so called, has disappeared from 
art? The answer is that it has not and never has 
disappeared from art save in America. The F rench, 
inheritors of the traditions of Greek and Italian art. 


S9ATIOUI ULVUI OY} JO 9UO S¥ Sd9I} Jo asvI[o} SuIMoys o[duexy 


AD Aosiof ‘asnopy-yinoy 
3591 ‘of Arenuel ‘puey oy} Joy Surdeg,, :LATTIJ SIAVG SIONVAT 


Aqunoy uospny] ‘epunjol jo uo! eIOIIC] 


‘ 


22772py Srevg Sr9uvty LQ JYstAhJo7 


mm SOT mon SEs 


D 


MURAL PAINTING 189 


and our masters in modern teaching, have been 
singularly sane and catholic until very lately. They 
have gone on painting subjects of any and every kind 
that have attracted them, for before everything they 
have been tolerant. In the last two decades this 
tolerance has extended to technic and has become 
laxity. So tolerant, indeed, they have been that 
just as during the later empire all the deities of the 
world were worshipped in Rome, so in Paris the air 
has been filled with theories until singleness of pur- 
pose has been stifled and practice has been deeply 
overlaid with so much novelty, imported or in- 
vented, that at last this novelty could no longer be 
assimilated and acute indigestion ensued. Art was 
auto-intoxicated. Some day the vermiform appen- 
dix of universal license will be extracted and the 
remembrance that all art is a convention will soothe 
it back into health. But we must not impute this 
-overtoleration to catholicity as to subject, for nota 
bene it has not been subject or variety of subject 
that has created this disturbance; it has been theory 
of presentation. 

The French, as I have said, never troubled them- 
selves to banish subject. In England and Germany, 
especially in the former, a natural reaction followed 
a period of cheap sentimentalism or frozen classi- 
cism. The primitive painters, Italian or Flemish, 
crowded into one panel or canvas repeated action 
by the same personages: in one corner the saint was 


190 SIGNIFICANCE IN 


baptized, in the middle he performed miracles, in 
the other corner he was beheaded, and above he was 
received into heaven. A somewhat similar naiveté 
in the middle of the nineteenth century selected all 
the most entertaining events that could come about 
in a railway station, for instance, and crowded them 
into one canvas. So in battle-pieces each character 
was occupied by taking part in its own little episode 
instead of being absorbed by the consciousness of 
an enemy to be shot at or shot by. This art in 
which too much happened was easy to ridicule, and 
was followed by that of the pre-Raphaelites who held 
fast to incident but tried to cast it in poetic form. 
Then came the vogue of the great Velasquez with 
_ the wise and witty sayings of his apostle Whistler. 
In his grave and lofty symphony of black and white 
and gray, Velasquez suppressed the negligible, and 
Whistler, whose joy was mystification, held up 
eschewal as almost the cardinal virtue. A handle 
for ridicule he could find easily, and he stuck so 
many of his friends and foes alike full of barbed 
shafts that they were afraid to express any opinion 
save that to leave out things was to keep within the 
narrow road to perfection. This is a dangerous 
credo, or rather lack of belief; it is almost as hard 
to leave out things intelligently as to put them in 
intelligently; skilful elimination and deliberate omis- 
sion are quite different things. Undue attention 
to subject will hurt an artist just as undue atten- 


MURAL PAINTING I9I 


tion to anatomy—lI mean overemphasized anatomy, 
or any other research pushed to excess—will inter- 
fere with the effect of his picture as an ensemble. 
But proper consideration at one time or another is 
due to every element of art. 

Probably our best excuse in America for neglect of 
subject has been that here in our young new school, 
where so much time had perforce to be given to 
purely technical considerations of line, mass, color, 
and tone, some of that same time might be gained 
by suppression of the consideration of significance. 
This was, perhaps, a not unnatural contention on 
the part of the student, and may have been for a 
while even a helpful one. But we have passed far 
beyond the need of such contention now. Amer- 
ican art in its landscapes and portraits is in full 
possession of a highly developed technic, and the 
time is ripe for a rounded school which cannot be 
complete without the thorough grasp upon signif- 
icance which has belonged to every school in the 
past. 

If significance is a desideratum in the school at 
large, to the mural painter it is an essential. He 
must realize once for all that he is both celebrant and 
recorder. He must possess significance; his clients 
demand it, and he must find the proper place for it, 
that is to say, must consider not only the character 
but the distribution of his subjects. What is suit- 
able for one place in the building is eminently un- 


192 SIGNIFICANCE IN 


fitting for another. There are pendentives, friezes, 
spandrels, over-doors, and many other kinds of 
spaces. Certain of these, especially those which 
are unusual in shape, such as spandrels or over- 
doors, will require special treatment, and what one 
may call essentially decorative figures, while his- 
torical subjects will demand the more commonplace 
shapes of rectangular panels, or, at any rate, spaces 
upon such portions of the walls as are not notably 
architectural, that is to say, constructional. 

To the true decorator the circumscribing lines of 
any wall or ceiling space cry aloud announcing their 
own peculiar decorative needs, and it is at once 
his serious consideration and his great pleasure so 
to compose his lines and masses within such wall 
spaces that they shall re-echo the framing and in 
a delicate way repeat some of the important lines 
of the architectural ornament which lies about or 
near them. Of this particular kind of composition 
Raphael was one of the supreme masters, and gen- 
erations of artists have trodden more or less as- 
suredly in his footsteps. 

To certain limitations the mural painter must 
make up his mind once for all; he may stretch them 
occasionally with advantage, but not burst them. 
The necessity for making an axial composition again 
and again imposes heavy drafts upon the painter’s 
inventiveness, and he must be a resourceful man 
who meets them repeatedly without becoming 


ee 


ad 


MURAL PAINTING 193 


monotonous. The decorator often feels that he 
could breathe more easily if he might deviate from 
this axial arrangement and adopt a freer composi- 
tion—and he may do so in his minor lunettes or 
panels, but when he comes to the focal decoration at 
the head, say, of some great room, the architect 


_knows that the decoration must be axial, that the 


mind must be carried through the eye just as di- 
rectly up the centre of his room as is the crank 
through the hull of an ocean liner. 

In such spaces then as we are accustomed to con- 
sider essentially architectural—spandrels, depressed 
lunettes, friezes—we think of architectonic arrange- 
ment, of crouching or bending figures or proces- 
sional people marching along under the cornice, but 
by and by the commissioners say: “Now. let us 
have as central motive for our room something from 
the history of the county, the famous trial of A, 
the celebrated speech of B in court, or the signing 
of such and such a famous act.” ‘The decorator is 
naturally disconcerted by this kind of subject be- 
cause it is made up of what one may call undecora- 
tive quantities—groups of people dressed much in the 
same way, and all standing or sitting much in the 
same attitude listening to the trial or speech. On the 
other hand, the commissioner is quite as naturally 
interested in such subjects; they are the stuff of 
which his county’s history is made, and he is en- 
titled to his painted souvenir. If the scene have 


194 SIGNIFICANCE IN 


only ever so little of the dramatic in it we can, with 
a good heart, put it upon one of the big rectangular 
wall panels; we can always have Gettysburgs and 
Bunker Hills and battles of Lake Erie on such sur- 
faces; but when it comes to the presentation of 
homely detail and quiet groups of listening figures, 
the artist’s task becomes more difficult. Sometimes 
the light can be made so decorative a factor that it 
turns the subject’s commonplaceness into romance, 
as in Robert Reid’s admirably conceived “Speech 
of Otis” in the Boston State House, or again some 
realistic detail may be ingeniously and decoratively 
insisted upon, as in the famous Velasquez of the 
Prado. The latter is one of the realistic subjects 
which can be called truly decorative, and it is made 
so largely by the reduplication of a great number of 
parallel spears which give to the picture its name 
of “The Lances of Breda.” . 
But even if the realistic subject be troublesome to 
treat, I repeat here, with emphasis, what I have said 
before, that the sooner we learn to celebrate decora- 
tively the happenings of our own time and people, 
the sooner our decorative painting will become 
firmly rooted. We may be a little misled in our 
consideration of ancient art; when we affirm that 
it is more often idealistic than realistic, we perhaps 
slight the latter side of it. The remote and quaint 
are always, to a certain extent, synonymous, and for 
that reason we are apt to class certain figures and 


Copyright, 1907, by the N. Y. Times 


H. Sippons Mowsray: Decoration in the University Club Library, 
New York City 


Example of a combination of personal and original work of the artist with a fifteenth- 
century treatment of detail, the whole adapted to the modern need 


MURAL PAINTING 195 


costumes as idealistic, which to their creators came 
much nearer to being realistic than we suppose. 
Our point of view has changed. The old masters 
were closer to their public than we are. To-day a 
nymph is further from our daily custom (and cos- 
tume!) than she was from that of Renaissance Flor- 
ence. If we paint her in bathing-dress she will seem 
rather an advertisement for Atlantic City than 
something which has stepped out of contempora- 
neous poetry, but Botticelli’s Virtues, or Beatitudes, 
or Bacchants might illustrate Poliziano’s verses, and 
yet wear gowns very little removed from those in 
which the Florentine girls shopped upon the Ponte 
Vecchio. 

It may be said: ‘Ah, yes, they went picturesquely 
garbed, we are unpicturesque.” I do not think that 
is quite enough to excuse us. It is true that far. dis- 
tant music has a charm of its own; one hopes that 
the “Song of Salamis” will always stir us, but 
*‘ John Brown’s Body” and “ Dixie” are stirring, too, 
and in either case it is the splendid connotation that 
appeals, whether from Greece or from our own battle- 
fields. I admit that in their electrical lines of fire 
the chariot and horses of the Herald Square adver- 
tisement give me more pleasure than a colossal 
siphon squirting sparks into an illuminated tumbler 
of simulated whiskey. I admit that the average 
boat, beautiful as it may be in line, is not quite 
so gorgeously picturesque as the Viking’s ship with 


196 SIGNIFICANCE IN 


its shields arow, its painted eyes and its dragon-head. 
But properly treated, the contemporaneous thing 
may astonish us by its decorative quality. Every- 
thing fitted to do its work has style of a kind. To 
the medizval man Scripture was so familiar that 
certain scenes were recognizable even when mere 
vague spots of color or black and white; they became 
real hieroglyphs. To-day the student of Italian art 
knows them from far off, seen ever so hurriedly, 
and says to himself as he passes some distant blur 
upon a wall, “ Annunciation”’ or “Flight into Egypt’ 
or “Adoration of the Magi.” Now it is the loco- 
motive or aeroplane or ocean liner that the crowd 
recognize, no matter how distant, upon the adver- 
tisement. But these things may have their decora- 
tive quality: locomotives, Mrs. Browning’s “Steam- 
eagles,” aeroplanes even more, may become finely 
suggestive. One illustrator may be required to pre- 
sent a battle-ship so baldly that every plate and 
rivet shall be seen in place, but the next one may be 
permitted to generalize till he shows us the impres- 
sive shadowy thing which towered up in a panel 
upon the wall of one of the exhibitions of the Archi- 
tectural League; and so, given enough power in 
the modern artist, we may finally be compelled by 
him, in looking at his spirited figures, to conclude 
that the cowboy’s yell is as exciting in its own way 
as the “terrible Juch hei saa of the Vikings.” 
“Nature is brimful of style, ‘search and ye shall 


MURAL PAINTING 197 


find,’ was written in the Scriptures for us painters,” 
said Bonnat once to me in Paris. And we must 
find the style and decorative interest in the con- 
temporary man, woman, and child; there is plenty 
of it. Only look at our street-babies dancing to the 
hand-organ, or playing in the flickering light of 
flaring gas torches in the evening where workmen 
are building or repairing! Women and children in- 
deed, especially to-day when feminine costume is 
still picturesque, are so much more decorative as a 
factor than most contemporary men that the artist 
hates to leave them out of his canvas, and when he 
has men only, he is reduced to such straits in 
making the sad-colored modern trousers tolerable 
that he execrates the memory of the first sans culotte. 
Our modern workman, however, can become as dec- 
orative a factor as the craftsman of the Renaissance. 
The trousers, strained by action until they take folds 
_and pleats that emphasize muscular effort, are quite 
different from the fresh-from-the-tailor article, and 
when strapped in at the ankle make, in combina- 
tion with the flannel shirt, a costume admirably 
adapted to artistic treatment. The tailor-made man 
taking part in a social function, however ceremo- 
nious, unless he wears a uniform, is truly a problem 
to the artist, because it has been the tailor’s first 
business to keep him fashionably conventional, so 
that he soon ceases to interest, save when he is 
treated as a portrait and by a clever painter. 


198 SIGNIFICANCE IN 


But it is the clever, the inventive painter only, 
whom we need as decorator. If he is clever enough 
he will compel interest even in the most prosaic of 
happenings. The men of the Middle Ages and the 
Renaissance had often and again to solve the prob- 
lem of making a commonplace subject decorative, 
and they did it with zsthetic tact if one may name 
it so. The Venetians signed plenty of treaties, and 
celebrated the same in pictured panels, but above 
the realistic men prosaically grouped, pen in hand, 
about a table, were seen Venice and her attendant 
goddesses throned upon clouds, watching the pro- 
ceeding, and compositionally connected with it by 
some doge or senator who, looking upward toward 
the divinized commonwealth, points at the signers. 
The old masters led their action upward and on- 
ward from the real into the ideal. It is easy to find 
fault with their moral donnée at times, when they 
apotheosize some scoundrel or weakling, some late 
Medici or later Louis XV, for instance, but there is 
nothing wrong in their decorative intuition. 

I say again that we must be modern, and we must 
be American. No matter how saturated we are with 
the art of the past, and the more the better, we 
must fasten our souvenir to the living present; no 
matter how much we love the pale ideal landscape of 
the primitive painters, or the noble, spacious, myth- 
ological fairy-land of Poussin, the glory of Claude’s 
sunsets, we must use our memory of them as frame 


MURAL PAINTING 199 


to some such happenings as live for Americans of 
to-day. No matter how enthusiastically we have 
studied the nude body, as presented in the broken 
fragments from Greek pediments or the marbles 
of Michelangelo, the muscles of Raphael’s tritons 
and nymphs, the glowing canvases of Venice, the 
bronzes of Donatello, we must remember that naked 
bodies bow themselves to dig our trenches and pud- 
dle our steel, work among us to-day, and are as in- 
teresting now under the American sun or in the fire- 
light of our foundries as they were in times when 
early Italian masters said: ““What a divine thing 
is this anatomy!” * 

It is then of the utmost importance that our 
artists learn to treat decoratively the marking events 
of our history, past or contemporaneous, of our 
Puritans and Dutch, our Revolutionary heroes, our 
Argonauts of ’49, our pioneers and colonizers and 
soldiers of the Civil War, our inventors and organ- 
izers, our men in the streets and in the fields of 
to-day; and special kinds of celebration should find 
place in particularly suited portions of our public 
buildings. 

For if we are asked, “‘In including realistic cele- 
bration of the chronicle, do you mean to leave out 
what is called ideal art, the sort of art which Ra- 
phael practised in the Segnatura, Veronese in the Col- 


*'To be exact, it was the divinity of Ja Perspettiva that Uccello cele- 
brated, but his contemporaries worshipped anatomy just as devoutly. 


200 SIGNIFICANCE IN 


legio?’”’ the answer is that that kind of art, if we 
can learn to practise it—and we may, since other 
modern men have done so—is the crowning glory 
of decoration, and should find its place at the very 
core and centre of a public building. For a certain 
form of distribution is indicated, prescribed almost, 
in the practice of the past, and will be in the future. 
Figures removed from those which we meet habit- 
ually, by their generalization into something more 
beautiful, more robust, more simple than is the 
daily habit of humanity, have always been the glory 
of decorative painting. And wherever painting was 
of necessity most closely bound to architecture, there 
such figures found their logical place. 

At the side of the mathematics and the music of 
the architect, giving figurative expression to his ge- 
ometry and measurements, his knowledge of weight 
and thrust and resistance, stood the symbolic fig- 
ures, half human, half mechanical, the caryatides of 
art, the space-fillers, the people whose business it is 
to bow themselves under weight, to fit themselves 
into angles, to recline in more and more developed 
recumbency as the pediment slopes and narrows to 
its corner. Such figures, also, we must always have 
in art in their predestined place as the so-called ideal 
figures, as much needed as the real, as comple- 
mentary and inevitable as sea to shore or heaven to 
earth. Michelangelo and Raphael, Veronese and 
Correggio understood this well, and could not have 


sjouvd 9ATPLIOIIP JO Sollgs V UI po9}Vot} O1BY [B90] & fo oft[ 94} Jo a[dwexy 
singstiiepy ‘joudes 
91¥1G vluUvATASUUIY IY} JO WOO SJOUIZAOL) dy} UT sjoued jo sotas ve WOT ,,UOISIA $,UUag,, ‘ATTAVO LATOIA 


UOLIUMLVDI G SIZAHD AQ 2YS5t4AGoOD €a7y¥VQ 4372014 XQ gysrttgoy 


MURAL PAINTING 201 


understood any art which was content to get along 
without some such figures. We have no Michel- 
angelos and Veroneses to-day, but the old masters 
believed in and supported a principle which related 
to every other time as well as to their own. They 
believed that lesser artists owed allegiance to the 
same principle and owed it in proportion to their 
artistic strength, and we owe it to-day in proportion 
to ours whether we are weak or strong. 

Will not some of our critics be just enough to 
admit the value of significance, the value of what 
all the world held a matter of faith till forty years 
ago? We have brilliantly able critics who know 
their old masters, both in art and literature, by heart 
and love them, yet who some of them seem to have 
been led to a different point of view by a small 
modern group of contemners of significance. The 
latter count largely upon the example of a few 
men who left aside what we commonly call subject. 
Velasquez painted, with marvellous insight, little 
infantas, dwarfs and idiots, and noble, grave gentle- 
men. When he painted the “Madonna in glory”’ he 
failed, to be sure, in embodying any high significance. 
But that is not enough to condemn high significance. 
It does not even prove that Velasquez would have 
thought lightly of truly emotional feeling in an altar- 
piece by another painter, or would have failed to 
admit that certain elements of elevated inspiration 
were outside the field in which he was himself un- 


202 SIGNIFICANCE IN 


rivalled. We are told that Tintoretto was his fa- 
vorite among Italian masters, and his purchases in 
Italy would seem to support the story. Does one 
need to say more! 

Frans Hals does not count pro or con, because he 
was all his life through given up wholly to portrait- 
painting—surely as noble a branch of art as exists, 
but which rules out what we ordinarily call subject. 

With the so-called little Dutchmen the case is some- 
what different. They are the great exponents of 
genre, and of genre, of course, subject is, literally con- 
sidered, a characteristic constituent. But with them 
subject is taken and treated so differently from that 
of which I have been speaking, as really to count as a 
different artistic element. It is in some not elevated 
but trivial. It is incident without ideality and its 
motive does not rise from mere interest into real in- 
spiration. Holland asked of its painters, as Taine ob- 
serves, to paint its portrait, and the little Dutchmen 
painted its lesser features. Consequently the field 
in which they achieve distinction is not that of the 
subject, where they are fundamentally negligible how- 
ever superficially devoted to it, but in that of technic. 
/ Yet so happy is their poise within their own limita- 
tions, often, that the slightness of their subject inter- 
est is itself a reinforcement of their technical effective- 
ness and not a qualification of it. So you see that 
even in this crucial instance of an art essentially with- 
out elevation, subject after all performs a service in- 


MURAL PAINTING 203 


stead of inflicting an injury. Without it the little 
Dutchmen would have turned even oftener than they 
did to the still-life in which they were at times superb 
but which no one but a fanatic would place on the 
same plane of zsthetic interest as their genre. 

In a picture by Mieris, a man pulls a little dog’s 
ear, a woman with a gentle gesture restrains him. 
Will the purist maintain that the picture would be 
better if the gestures, the episodical were eliminated? 
Surely it would, if some higher form of significance 
were substituted. But in any case it would be the 
presence of technic, not the absence of the so-called 
story-telling quality, that would save the picture or 
even make it better in any important degree. 

Take a great man who does not belong to the past 
but to the present, Jean Francois Millet! Some of 
the contemners of subject would praise Millet as 
an example which proves their point, because he is 
content to paint a girl working at a churn and does 
not become anecdotic over her performance. But I 
am not excusing trivial anecdote; I am upholding 
significance, and Millet adored high significance in 
Michelangelo and extolled the story-telling power of 
Poussin; furthermore, his own pictures are the em- 
bodiment of it and his care about having each figure 
intent on its own work, “‘tout d son euvre,”’ and thus 
technically expressive rather than superficially strik- 
ing, is due to this feeling of his. And still further, if 
you tell me that the post-impressionists are an 


204 SIGNIFICANCE IN 


example of what the pursuit of significance may 
lead to when they make a girl’s arm two yards long 
to show that she is reaching out after something 
which she yearns for, I need only say that mean- 
ing run riot is like any other good thing gone to 
the bad. 

Finally, even giving up to those who decry signifi- 
cance, Velasquez, Hals, Vermeer, and the little 
Dutchmen on whom alone they can rely (and who, I 
suspect, judging from some of their own perform- 
ances, would have marvelled over the imputation as 
a quality of absence of subject), is there any reason 
why Velasquez, Hals, and Vermeer, glorious trinity 
though they be, should prove all others wrong? If 
there are men to-day who like Vermeer can enchant 
us without subject—and I admit that there are some 
who do—let us be thankful for their good fortune and 
ours, but let us hope too that other modern artists 
struggling to express themselves may not fall from 
grace because they admire and believe in the signifi- 
cance which greater and happier artists achieved:4 in 
the past. | 

Nor may the purist declare that he does not con- 
demn all significance; that we are free to make our 
Washington dignified-looking, our Franklin intelli- 
gent-looking, our “widow” sad-looking, and so on. 
For the fact is, the enemy of significance condemns 
the first steps in its direction; if he sees a head 
emergent along those lines he hits it, and if he con- 


Copyright by the Curtis Publishing Company 


Maxrietp ParrisH: Decoration for the girls’ dining-room 
of the Curtis Publishing Company, Philadelphia 


Example of decoration used as a cultivating and enlivening influence ina 
great commercial building 


MURAL PAINTING 205 


demns preparation he condemns the whole. As well 
say you are at liberty to leap the street but not to 
stride the gutter. 

This idea that to have an idea, to have any 
subject, is to spoil the technic reminds me of the 
patient fishermen of Paris and of what an ac- 
quaintance of mine once said about them. To-day 
in Paris men stand by the side of the Seine fishing, 
hour after hour, day after day, week after week, in 
loving devotion to their sport. Nobody ever saw 
them catch anything. Once an American remarked 
this fact to my acquaintance cited above. The lat- 
ter replied: ‘Catch anything! no, surely not—to 
catch anything would interfere with the fishing.” 

High significance has been a quality inseparable 
in the past from any national art. In the future is 
its achievement to be eliminated as an interference? 


= 
pS, 
<x 
Z 
_— 
Zz 
os 
be 
2 
v 
_ 
= 
| 
= 
ao ae 


VIII 
FUNDAMENTAL EDUCATION IN ART 


THE importance of foundation is the name which 
I should like to give to this portion of my argu- 
ment. Such a name would suggest the caption to 
a first chapter rather than to one so far along in the 
series, and indeed it is a beginning over again in the 
sense that while the previous chapters have been ad- 
dressed to those especially interested in mural paint- 
ing, this one is for him who cares for every kind of 
art production whatever it may be. 

In all of the art schools in our many cities one 
finds vitality, vigor, curiosity. Sometimes these are 
applied with more force to the work in hand, some- 
times with less; but in the main it is about the same 
thing whether in New York, Chicago, or elsewhere. 
One sees promise of excellence, of success, every- 
where in the work, and again one sees certain other 
things which give one pause. 

When I entered a Paris studio more than forty 
years ago conditions were very different from what 


they are to-day; and yet as I look at their work it 
209 


210 FUNDAMENTAL EDUCATION IN ART _ 


appears to me that the young people now are hav- 
ing just about the same kind of trouble that I and 
my comrades had; which makes me think that 
people are pretty much alike up and down the world, 
and even at long-separated periods of time, and 
causes me to wonder whether noting some of my 
own experiences and those of others, in both the 
immediate and remote past, might in any way be 
useful. 


** Ars una, species mille—art is one, its species are 
a thousand.” So it is proclaimed by the voice of 
the ages. From the art student we should hear 
something - different—that is, if I am to judge by 
myself and my comrades of the atelier in which I 
began to study in Paris. Could our voice as a school 
have become concentratedly articulate it would have 
said, “Species una, ars mea, ars sola—one species, 


my kind of art, the only art.” Perhaps things are 


not like that now. Conditions have changed. I am 
speaking of forty years ago. It was certainly like 
that then, and in a way it was right that it should 
be. “My kind of art the only art,” is a pretty 
good battle-cry for a beginner. If he have not con- 


fidence in his own legs, how is he going to stand — 
upon them? He must have confidence in his own 


master and his own school, and that confidence, if 
strong enough to act as an anchor, would be more 
valuable to us of the last thirty years than ever be- 


saouaptsal aivatid 07 parjdde sv uonviosap jo sjdwex iy 


9snoy UMO $.jSTVIe oY} Jo WOOJ-3UIM PIP oy} Ul Jou Pe ash jo SnIudl) MUL, -AAd duvMOT{ 


2 


FUNDAMENTAL EDUCATION IN ART art 


fore. For in the past half dozen lustrums has come a 
crowding together of so-called movements, and such 
a series of analyses supposed to be searching that 
the very thought of them is disconcerting. Just be- 
yond the horizon of our school life it all lies waiting 
to burst upon us. What wonder that when it does 
many of us are overwhelmed, that the faint-hearted 
perish, and even the courageous feel jaded at once 
in the presence of this prodigious Art, while the 
aggressive say to themselves: “I must scream at the 
top of my voice, else who will accord me any per- 
sonality? What can I enunciate that is loud and 
clear enough to catch the ear of even ever so small 
a public?” 

This anarchistic condition, this series of earth- 
quakes in methods, has so shaken our artistic con- 
sciousness that the intelligent student may be for- 
given for wondering which way he shall go. When 
I went abroad conditions were at once much easier 
and much harder, and you may turn the proposition 
inside out and repeat it to-day. They were harder 
for us Americans then because there was nothing 
to study in America. “Go straight to Paris,’’ said 
William Morris Hunt to me. “You will only have 
to unlearn what you learn here.”” There were prac- 
tically no art schools on this side of the water at the 
time. On the other hand the conditions were easier 
than now because once you reached Paris they were 
simpler—simplicity itself, indeed, in comparison with 


212 FUNDAMENTAL EDUCATION IN ART 


what confronts the student who goes there to-day. 
To turn the proposition inside out, as I said, con- 
ditions in America to-day are much easier for the 
student, because his education has been prodig- 
iously facilitated by numberless schools and much 
besides. On the other hand, they are harder because 
the anarchistic cenditions have shaken the founda- 
tions of art education. 

In Paris, in 1867, we trotted along wearing blind- 
ers, not turning our eyes from side to side, but fix- 
ing them on the master, in our first kindergarten of 
art training, and before our vision was strong enough 
to bear looking upon more than one thing at a time. 
Oddly enough, and utterly as the conditions varied, 
I believe that in our first months we suffered from 


exactly the same handicap that is affecting Amer- 


ican students now. The difference, however, was 
and is that our master found us out and sent us to 
the right-about, whereas here our Pegasus seems to 


have taken the bit in his teeth and is likely to give 


his rider some bad tumbles before he can become 
firmly seated. 

It happened in the month of May, 1867, forty- 
three years ago, that the ideal of a little group of 
art students in Paris was exactly the same as the 
ideal of nearly all the art students in America to- 
day—namely, vigor of handling. What we wanted 
was a vigorous-looking surface which should not 
appear “labored,” only at that time we had not 


FUNDAMENTAL EDUCATION IN ART 213 


found the word labored; we divided everything into 
smooth painting and strong painting. Since then 
we have invented fifty different surfaces and given 
them fifty names. 

Long ago, when I went to Paris, which was still 
the Paris of Du Maurier’s Trilby, the capital of the 
decadent Second Empire, and very different from 
the city of to-day, the exhibitions were full of rather 
feeble work. The glorious group of Barbizon, Millet, 
Rousseau, and the rest were getting ready for im- 
mortality, but had not yet come into their own, and 
the official painters of imperialism were not stimulat- 
ing. At the Beaux Arts, Cabanel and Pils, Hébert, 
Géréme, and others were teaching. There were one 
or two ateliers indépendants, as they were called. 
Of these the Atelier Bonnat was by far the most 
famous. Léon Bonnat, young, and bringing with 
him the traditions of Spanish vigor and the cultus 
of Ribera and Velasquez, had opened an atelier 
d éléves, as they named it, a studio of pupils, to which 
and to whom he gave his services without payment. 
To it I went with many other Americans. Our 
master was the sensation of the moment; he had 
just missed the grand medal of honor with his pic- 
ture of “St. Vincent de Paul,” now.in the church 
of St. Nicholas in the Fields—fields which are in 
the heart of Paris—and was to capture it at the fol- 
lowing Salon with his canvas, “The Assumption of 
the Virgin.” 


214. FUNDAMENTAL EDUCATION IN ART 


The latter was a brilliant performance, and had 
retained its color finely when I saw it again five 
years or so ago in the church of St. Andrew of the 
charming old city of Bayonne. For Bonnat came 


from the Basque provinces at the foot of the Pyr- 


enees (and he has given a noble collection of old 
masters to the museum of his native city, having 
been an enthusiastic acquirer of them for many 
years). Bonnat did not practise the smooth paint- 
ing then in vogue; his was made up of vigorous 
brush strokes dans la pate. Great is paint was our 
one thought and cry; paint, paint—lots of it. Who 
so contemptible as he who put it on thinly; who so 
safely launched as he who carried a load of it! 


B., our massier, was a worthy leader; he was a 


mortar-and-trowel man, and we followed him, gaily 
contemptuous of any practice done outside of 31 
Rue de Laval. One of the best of the many good 
qualities of the Paris art student in those days 
(I trust he has as many now) was his intense re- 
spect for his master. At that time Americans were 
but a tiny minority; the French students gave the 
tone and atmosphere of the studios. Netherlanders, 
Scandinavians, Russians, even Spaniards, were still 
in the future as influences upon art. M. Bonnat 
entered the atelier twice a week. Then the usual 
helpful accompaniment of our work, the imitation 
of cornets and organs, of lions, dogs, and pigs, died 
away; pipes were put out. M.’s singing—his voice 


0 ee ee ee ee 


FUNDAMENTAL EDUCATION IN ART 215 


literally made the great window rattle in its setting, 
and though I’ve often heard the expression used, I 
have known its realization only in his case—M.’s 
voice, I say, ceased; you could hear a pin drop. 
One morning, in this almost painful first moment of 
quiet succeeding noise, Monsieur Bonnat said: “Gen- 
tlemen, why do you use so much paint? You are 
only tripping yourselves up. J do not use a great 
quantity of paint for its own sake, but because my 
temperament is such that I can get my effect better 
in that way.” 

The shells that dropped upon the frozen lake at 
the battle of Austerlitz, submerging whole regiments, 
were hardly more horribly quenching to enthusiasm 
than such a statement made to us so suddenly. 
For a long while afterwards the atelier was troub- 
led; in time the medicine worked with some of the 
men and the fit survived. B. went under; he never 
came to anything; not, please understand, because 
forcible painting was bad, but because he had not 
the stuff of a forcible painter in him, put all his 
strength into misdirected effort, and, I verily be- 
lieve, smothered his own feeble yet existent poten- 
tialities under a “gruel thick and slab” of pigment. 

Bonnat followed up this sudden illumination. He 
insisted upon our making hard, close studies as pre- 
paratory to doing, later, things as vigorous as his 
if we pleased, more vigorous than his if we could. 
He watched our artistic inclinations, and to correct 


216 FUNDAMENTAL EDUCATION IN ART 


certain of my tendencies he sent me to the Imperial 
Library to make pencil copies of the hard line en- 
gravings after Raphael done by Mare Antonio Rai- 
mondi in the sixteenth century. No matter how 
- much we wanted to paint, we must draw for a year 
first, for two years if we had the time, and if the shal- 
lowness of our purses did not prevent our remaining 
in even inexpensive Paris. ‘‘My Americans,” said 
M. Bonnat to me long afterwards, “‘are some of the — 
very best stuff that I have, but they do not stay 
long enough, and that often spoils all.” We obeyed — 
our master implicitly, or at any rate tried to; al- 
though our atelier was one of the most unruly in 
Paris, as we realized when it was moved from 31 
Rue de Laval to 73 Boulevard de Clichy, and we 
found that we had been just upon the eve of expul- 
sion by the police of the quarter, so full was their 
complaint book of the remonstrances of our neigh- 
bors. The arts of peace were apparently not always 
our forte, but when it came to belief in the master, 
the patron, who could coin money in his own studio 
yet preferred to give two full forenoons a week to 
us, it was another matter. At all events, we had to 
draw and draw, model and model, just as carefully 
and closely as we might and for a very long time. 
And I believe that our obedience was enormously 
valuable to us. Imagine a pupil to-day in Paris 
who thought it right to study hard cingue-cento line 
engravings at the library when instead he might be 


ydes3ojoyd ay ul Ajajenbope pasapual jou st [eUIsIIo oY Ul YS] Jo Jaye oJ, 


*ssvyV ‘UOJsOg ‘asnopy 9}¥1g 94} UI UONvIODIG =, "SQ sae jo ydeedg oy ],,, :dIay LUIAOY 


FUNDAMENTAL EDUCATION IN ART 217 


freely developing in a city where all artistic chains 
are now broken, where knowledge must give way to 
feeling, where we may make a better man or woman 
out of a box of square blocks than by imitating their 
anatomy more closely. 

Now I believe that the student to-day is just as 
_ willing to work hard as he was forty years ago. He 
has every whit as much enthusiasm, but I think 
that in the quality of obedience he is not quite so 
strong. I will not call it obedience to his master, 
but obedience to something which is way down at 
the bottom of his consciousness and which he is 
inclined to cover up. [I fear that all this talk about 
freedom and feeling has bred an inevitable impa- 
tience of restraint, and that students are more in- 
clined to do their hard work in their own way and 
less in that of their master. But art is a convention 
now as it always has been and always will be; the 
links of the chain hold and its evolution must ac- 
complish itself by law; the artist of to-day cannot 
break it all off and make a new departure, for if 
it is easy to tear up a receipt it is dificult to make 
a new one. 

Hard work and obedience to law are both virtues, 
but the mere exercise of a virtue is not enough; it 
must be virtue qualified by intelligence. There are 
those who have said to-day in France: ‘‘The art of 
all the past has existed only to show us what ought 
not to be done.”’ Between these men who talk and 


218 FUNDAMENTAL EDUCATION IN ART 


as yet have accomplished little, and the men who 
have accomplished miracles, is it so hard to choose? 
Let us hear the latter. It has often been told us 
that Michelangelo said, “Genius is eternal patience,” 
and there is no doubt that Michelangelo was an ex- 
pert in the definition of genius if ever a man was. 
Thomas Carlyle, too, defined genius as a “‘tran- 
scending capacity for taking trouble.” 

Students may remember then, when they wish to 
work vigorously and powerfully, and when they 
disdain what they call labored painting—may re- 
member, I say, that two of the most rugged and 
original personalities that ever existed, the one in 
literature, the other in art, have averred that pa- 
tience—careful, painstaking patience—is the crown- 
ing virtue which shall furnish the basis to the bril- 
liant and captivating vigor which is so desirable an 
achievement. And do not mistake my intention. 
I am with the student. I sympathize in his wish. 
The skilful manipulation of pigment is a capacity to 
be struggled for and to be proud of when obtained; 
it makes the surface of the canvas attract at once. 
But if the canvas is to be made vital-looking and 
lastingly solid as well as attractive, behind and un- 
der the lively manipulation of pigment there must be 
construction and knowledge, the fruit of hard work. 

Idolatry of mere dexterity is peculiarly dangerous 
in America because it assails us along the lines of 
the least resistance. Dexterousness comes naturally 


pO ee ee a A ae 


FUNDAMENTAL EDUCATION IN ART 219 


to the American, and in its favor he is sometimes 
only too ready to suppress hard thinking, which is 
the one invaluable kind of hard work and discipline 
in any profession. Technical excellence is at its 
very best only a means to an end, and art stands 
for something much finer, greater, and deeper than 
even the very skilfullest and most brilliant handling 
of one’s tools. 

And it is easy to be specious in advocating strength. 
“I flog the canvas with swift brush strokes,”’ is 
quoted as a saying of Van Gogh, but in saying it he 
merely coined a phrase which catches the ear. “I 
base my swift strokes upon a swift apprehension of 
the true sizes, shapes, and colors of things in nature,” 
would be much more illuminating and convincing, 
if not so picturesque as to wording. It would also 
be much more difficult of accomplishment. 

Dashing handling is so good to look at, and con- 
veys such a sense of pleasure in the work of the 
executant, that I do not expect easily to convert 
students to the renunciation of vigorous brushing 
for a period long enough to suffice for even a few 
close studies. Nevertheless, let me assure them 
that the greatest artists, and among them those 
who have attained phenomenal facility, have almost 
invariably commenced by close, patient, and even 
hard studies of nature. Velasquez is a notable ex- 
ample of this. He began with the closest surface 
handling, then progressed to his final marvellous 


220 FUNDAMENTAL EDUCATION IN ART 


maestria, Some great artists like Hals have gone 
straight on from the beginning, always loosening 
their manner; others have had occasional returns 
upon themselves. As for Rembrandt, he com- 
menced with a smooth and exquisite finish; then 
later, when he could toss about his pigment as he 
willed, and juggle his surface into a jewelled glitter 
or pass through it into broad, air-filled depths, he 
would suddenly turn back to his first close manner. 
Look at his Syndics in the museum of Amsterdam— 
then at some little picture by him—an interior of 
Solomon’s Temple, for instance, with its crowded 
figures—and see how well an artist who never had 
a superior realized that broad painting would not 
suit all moods or all needs. Note, too, how Rubens, 
from whose brush flowed rivers of oiliest pigment, 
learned to make studies exquisite in finish and closer 
ness of modelling. 

If you are tired of my wise saws about the past, 
if you want a modern instance? here it is. 

For reliance upon handling, pure and simple, I 
know of no more remarkable example than that of 
M. Henri Martin. When you first see his immense — 
mural paintings for Toulouse, you cannot think of 
anything but the handling; these tens of thousands - 
of little spots of every kind of yellow, pink, green, 
and blue seem like sunlight resolved into its differ- 
ent chemical properties, and fill the eye and mind. 
His mowers and maidens are just congeries of these 


FUNDAMENTAL EDUCATION IN ART 221 


same little spots. The gowns have no folds, the 
faces no eyes, noses, mouths, nothing but spots, 
spots, spots. 

By and by, after you have fallen back to the 
proper distance and recovered from the first pleasant 
shock of this charming surface, you realize that it is 
not only infused with a rare sense of color, but that 
these silhouettes are of just the right shape, the 
lights and shadows of the right value, and that 
behind it all is knowledge—knowledge earned slowly, 
by earnest, thoughtful work. Best of all, you may 
have the proof of this by merely going a few yards 
further and passing through a door; and it is for 
this reason that a visit to the Capitole, as it is called, 
of the old city of Toulouse in southern France, is of 
quite peculiar value to any painter, and especially 
to any mural worker. Here upon the gallery walls 
you have the gamut of Henri Martin, and behold 
you find him beginning with close drawing, in which 
all the details, although kept relatively flat, are made 
out and modelled, and we note with natural sur- 
prise that this painter of intensely rich and vibrant 
harmonies has begun in a cold, even a chalky key. 
Next, in his large canvas, “4 chacun son chimeére,” a 
_ vibrant warmth is beginning to make itself gently 
felt like the sun through mist; we recall his decora- 
tions in the Hotel de Ville of Paris, as a link between 
the chimére and his final manner, and we come upon 
the latter in the sonorous color of the canvas in 


222 FUNDAMENTAL EDUCATION IN ART 


which the Toulousans walk beside their river against 
an after-sunset sky. Or take one of our own com- 
rades, Gari Melchers. In his exhibition of a few years 
ago in New York there was a large canvas represent- 
ing Dutch girls in church, hard and close in every 
detail; but if it had not been for what he learned 
in such earnest, early study as that picture shows 
he could never have painted the rich, vigorously 
brushed solid canvas which has so much vitality as 


it hangs upon the walls of the Metropolitan Mu- 


seum of Art. 

As I have said before in writing of Frans Halls, 
Hals’s brush strokes are not wonderful because they 
are broad, but because while broad they are of ex- 
actly the right size, shape, and tone, and are laid on 
in exactly the right place. No matter how hand- 
somely you stir up your surface, if you do not know 
your subsurface well somebody will see through the 
upper layer and find you out. If underneath you 
have a closely modelled study, you may strike out 
details, broaden planes, and your resultant breadth 
will look felt and finished. It will have nothing 
flimsy about it, but will have quality instead, and 
seem what it is—a solid piece of work. All this be- 
cause you have built it on a foundation. It is an 
honest piece of work, and you have achieved your 
desired vigor too, for in loving the latter you are 
not worshipping a false god. He is a beneficent and 
salutary god, but in sacrificing to him you will be 


JO[OD YIM YIOM-JoljaI MO] puve YySIy pur pos fo asn 9y} jo sjdurrxy 
"ssvJ[ ‘uojsog ‘Arviqry oyqng oy} ul uoNvioj9gq §,,*AIUIT], ay} Jo ewMZ0q oYT,,, :INTOuvS *g NHOf 


UOLIMBD GD StpAnND Ko py sith Gor ‘yP~orsogoys v UtorT “FOOL ShAVAQLT 227QNg ay, £0 Saapsiaz ayy XQ 2YStAhJoD 


FUNDAMENTAL EDUCATION IN ART 223 


twice blest if you burn incense also to his twin deity, 
the Goddess of Patience. 

If one studies the history of painting—I do not 
mean only by reading about it in books, but by look- 
ing at it upon the walls of palaces and churches, over 
the altars of the Gothic period, in the pilastered 
-corniced frames of the fifteenth century, or in the 
heavily sculptured coffers to ceilings of the late 
Renaissance—one finds that the school’s evolution 
has been like the evolution of the individual. 

First the gown was buttoned tight for strenuous 
endeavor, then gradually loosened, and under the 
loosened, vigorously brushed surface of the canvas 
there has been at first a close preparation; for one 
cannot begin with Rembrandt in his last stage, or 
Hals in his, or Velasquez in his—one must begin as 
they did, with care and patience. 

As I walk through the art schools of America I 
am astonished at the vigor of the work, and I be- 
come filled with enthusiasm at the contact with so 
much young enthusiasm in others. I say to myself, 
“What vigor everywhere, what liveliness, what good 
fresh color, how the understanding of color and to- 
nality, especially of distinction of tone, are growing in 
the American school, and how much feeling for light 
there is,” then I add, after the apprehension has 
come gradually, “‘and what similarity in all the class- 
work of pupils!’’ And I ask myself, “Is it entirely 
right that the work of so many young people who 


224 FUNDAMENTAL EDUCATION IN ART 


presumably possess such different temperaments, 
should be so much alike, even admitting that this is 
but an early step in their development?” Why 
should it be so similar? It is not because they have 
the same master, for they have not. It is not be- 
cause they lack willingness to look hard, according to 
their own lights, at models who differ very much yet 
seem so much alike in the painted studies. Finally, I 
have thought I recognized what caused the similar- 
ity, and realized that all over America the pupils, 
while trying for light and color, were caring supremely 
about one thing above every other—namely, that 
their work should look vigorous and not labored, 
and believed that this vigor could be indicated only 
by a very loose handling of the paint. ‘Not la- 
bored ”—fatal expression, grievously hurtful in its 
implication. What can be done in art or anywhere 
else without study—without studious thought? And 
studious thought is labor. With this idea, that a 
surface which looks labored must be avoided, the stu- 
dents throughout America are nearly all treating it in 
nearly the same way. Butit is in his treatment of 
this surface that the painter expresses his own tem- 
perament; and it is not probable that the tempera- 
ments of all students are as much alike as the surface 
uniformity that I speak of would imply. It is quite 
sure that later in life able students will find that 
they differ importantly, and that they will succeed 
along the lines not of their similarity but of their 


FUNDAMENTAL EDUCATION IN ART 225 


differentiation. I do not mean that they should 
throw the reins on to the neck of their inclination 
and let it run away with them. They should look 
hard at nature; but the harder and more honestly 
they look the more impossible they will find it to 
see nature just as their fellow student does, for the 
_ very simple reason that they are they and he is he. 

It is easy to understand how it all happens, and 
it has happened to us all in our time. In art, as in 
so many things, there is always a momentary popu- 
lar tendency among practitioners, which sometimes 
is hardly more than an exaggerated fad, but oftener, 
as in the present case, is based on a very real desid- 
eratum—that of vigor. The students, A, B, C, D, are 
working hard at their studies from the same model. 
A becomes much interested in the painting of cer- 
tain muscles in the back; delicate forms they are, 
and before he knows it he is smoothing them and 
pushing them to a relative finish. Suddenly he looks 
up and says to himself: “How much more vigorous 
B’s muscles look in the back which he 1s painting! 
It will never do to leave mine so smooth. ‘They are 
feeble beside his”; and at once a bigger brush and 
some loaded strokes make his study look like B’s. 
C and D are also thinking first of all about strength, 
therefore the four studies look alike. 

Mr. Kenyon Cox said, in his admirable lectures, 
that the desire for vigorous strokes has so increased 
the size of brushes that with many of those cur- 


226 FUNDAMENTAL EDUCATION IN ART 


rently used it is no longer possible to execute any - 
form in nature which is less than one inch wide. 
Now nature is full of forms, some of them as beauti- 
ful as any in the world, which are a good deal less 
than an inch wide, and you must learn to execute 
them. You do not go to school for the achieve- 
ment of vigor alone in painting, but for the attain- 
ment of all-round knowledge which you will trans- 
late into vigor or delicacy, accordingly as one or 
the other best serves your purpose. 

Varying treatments will be useful at different 
times, for not only do artists’ temperaments differ, 
but moods as well; one thing will be done better 
to-day, another to-morrow. Later in life the artist 
will deliberately throw away for the moment some 
acquired knowledge, set :t aside for the time and 
work along the best lines; that is to say, the most 
sympathetic. But all-round knowledge, ballast- 
knowledge, must be at hand to start with. After- 
ward some of it may be thrown overboard to lighten 
ship or balloon, to reach a higher wave crest, or 
mount into a rarer ether. 

The more you know processes, and the better you 
understand them, the more you will profit; but your 
highest profit will come from the clear apprehension 
that they are one and all means, not ends. Fora 
process may become too costly for what it accom- 
plishes. You remember the prince in the fairy 
story. He had learned to use his sword so adroitly 


FUNDAMENTAL EDUCATION IN ART 227 


and swiftly, that when a shower came he could 
flourish his blade so rapidly about his head as to 
parry every drop and remain quite dry. It was cer- 
tainly wonderful enough for fairy tale, but an um- 
brella would have entailed less labor, and such dex- 
terity of fence should have served a greater purpose. 

A famous artist in speaking of «he changes that 
come with the sequence of years, used to say: “In 
eighteen hundred and so and so, all the pictures in 
the Paris Salon looked as if they were painted with 
ink; in eighteen hundred and something else, all the 
pictures in the Salon looked as if they weré painted in 
chalk, but they were just the same pictures.” 

He meant that those who are so impressible as 
to follow each fashion of the moment, be it for tonal- 
ity or vigor or feeling, merely swell that regular and 
unending processional which keeps alive the com- 
monplace for its little day, then melts into oblivion, 
leaving no mark. 

In all that I have to say to students there is noth- 
ing half so close to my heart as the desire to impress 
the absolute necessity for hard, careful, close drawing 
and modelling from nature, before they permit them- 
selves to loosen their surface and handle vigorously. 
What shall I say to impress the student with what 
I am sure are facts, and will have to be met later 
if he tries to avoid them at first? The later he meets 
them the worse they will be; they are like mumps 
and measles—the young go through them easily, 


228 FUNDAMENTAL EDUCATION IN ART. 


but those who are grown older and more inelastic are 
roughly treated by them. 

When an invading army enters an enemy’s coun- 
try it takes good care not to leave behind it, between 
itself and its own frontier, any fortified cities held 
by the enemy, because such fortresses would become 
sources of danger in case of doubt or defeat. There- 
fore the invading army makes itself master of such 
places before proceeding farther. Now if you pro- 
duce brilliantly handled and broadly constructed 
work, without having first learned to construct very 
closely and correctly, you will be in precisely the . 
condition of a careless invading force with dangerous 
enemies behind it. 

Or let us take another and more artistic simile. 
Venice, one of the greatest art centres of the past, is, 
as you know, built upon wooden piles driven into 
the mud of the lagoons at the head of the Adriatic. 
A thousand years ago its houses were rough and 
rude; gradually they grew into beauty, and as time 
went on, palaces took their place, and always newer 
and lovelier palaces, till the very flower of Gothic 
and Renaissance art bloomed above the mud of 
the morass. It was all supported upon piles driven 
with a cunning and skill which are interesting when 
one reads of them. It wasn’t pleasant down there 
in the black mud; it was even less pleasant than it 
is in the schoolroom where the student groans over 
the difficulties of close drawing and modelling, but 


uvdAy ‘yf SPWOUT, “JJ 


Je QUSpIsol oY} Ul WNYISNuU Jv OU} Ul UONPIOIIG(] :-LONOWUYAACVTHOS ° [| NVNAATL 


a 1 
teed , 
a 
ees 
‘ 
ag 
* 
f 
i 
4 
< = 


FUNDAMENTAL EDUCATION IN ART 229 


the pile-driving had to be done, and done right, in 
order that the superstructure should be substantial 
and lasting. Festina lente (Make haste slowly), said 
the old Romans; they did make haste slowly, and 
established so firm a polity that they enlightened 
the world for two thousand years. 

Perhaps some students will say to me: ‘‘ Why this 
‘reiterated sententiousness? Why do you persist in 
telling us that water is wet and fire will burn? We 
know all about spiders and patience, and squirrels 
and nuts and industry. Tell us something newer 
and more exciting.” Let me say that in a time of 
almost universal sensationalism a little sententious- 
ness has a positive value. A phenomenal condition 
has obtained in Paris, where absolute freedom in the 
arts is preached, and feeling is extolled, not only as 
the highest, but as the only desideratum. This new 
movement will die out in time, from inanition, emp- 
tiness, lack of nourishment from within or without. 
But meantime this preachment of license is doing 
harm. Young people think: ‘‘Why wear chains of 
endeavor if one may do better without them?” Let 
me quote to you two statements, which I have heard 
made with most evident sincerity. 

First this one—some people who are interested in 
establishing a great art school, who have given their 
fortunes to it, and who have had experience of many 
years, said the other day: “The result of what we 
have learned by our experience is this: ‘We must 


230 FUNDAMENTAL EDUCATION IN ART 


not have anything to do with paying pupils. Any 
young people who pay for their education will not 
do hard, close drawing. They insist that as a re- 
turn for what they pay they must be allowed to 
divert themselves with pigment, and make at once 
dashing-looking studies in color. Therefore, if we 
are to make artists we want only non-paying pupils 
of a free school, then we can insist upon their study- 
ing seriously.’ ”’ 

Now let us listen to the other statement. It was 
made by the teachers and governing body of a great 
free art school. They said: “It is a pity that in 
order to be exempt from taxation we have to main- 
tain a free school; perhaps if our young people had 
to pay something they might realize the value of 
education and be willing to do some hard drawing 
and studying. As it is, they say to themselves: 
“We pay nothing. This is a free school. We wish 
to be free to study in our way, to be broad and 
easy, and up-to-date in our methods.’” 

Now I have simply quoted to you what I have 
heard said recently. What do you think of these 
opinions, of the temper of pupils? If they are cor- 
rect, why then we are between the devil and the 
deep sea! 

I know that the young art students of America 
declare with a good conscience, and quite truly, that 
they are enthusiastically willing to work hard; but 
I say that they must be willing not only to labor 


FUNDAMENTAL EDUCATION IN ART 231 


over what they like to study, but also over what 
they do not like to study, else they'll never attain 
to anything but a one-sided development. And 
mind, that in saying all this I personally sympathize 
heartily with the desire for vigorous brushing in a 
picture. I believe in it. But vigorous brushing 
must be backed up by other and preparatory quali- 
ties. 

Though the student may succeed in getting bril- 
liant surfaces without a substructure of knowledge, 
he will find the earth shaking under his feet, weak 
spots will begin to show through, and he will lose 
his time in trying to repair what ought to have 
been right in the beginning. If, however, he begins 
with close work based on knowledge, he may make 
all sorts of mistakes as he goes on, may flounder 
about, yet in time he will get the effect he wants, 
because the work was built right in the beginning, 
and he has under foot a solid field for experiment- 
ing until he attains the right solution of his prob- 
lem. I, at least, have verified all this by bitter 
experience, by my blunders, by light-heartedly jump- 
ing over something and leaving it behind instead of 
filling it up, leaving it because I was in a hurry to 
reach my goal and get my effect. 

Broad painting, to be sure, as painting impresses 
more forcibly and immediately than close painting 
ever can. As aman learns more and more, he may, 
with great advantage to his canvases, suppress de- 


232 FUNDAMENTAL EDUCATION IN ART 


tail in favor of breadth. But close study he must 
have at first as the basis for knowledge, because— 
and now listen to this, and remember it always— 
in his rendering of nature no one can intelligently 
leave out of an art work what he has not already 
learned to intelligently put into it. This statement is 
so sound that it cannot be controverted, and with it 
this chapter may close. 


{X 
THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTURE 


IX 
THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTURE 


I 


In the foregoing chapters pleas have been made 
for recognition of the importance of decoration, of 
the necessity for harmony among those who create 
that decoration, and of the value of experience. 
From such experience and collaboration will inevita- 
bly result good art, but it will not all be art of one 
kind, for there are many paths up Parnassus, and they 
alllead tothe top. These last chapters will be given 
to a plea for toleration and culture, that is to say 
for a withholding of censure in favor of examination. 

The latter will widen into culture which will ensure 
catholicity as to methods, and will help us to develop, 
each in our own way, while it will diminish the likeli- 
hood of his being at the mercy of almost purely de- 
structive criticism from those who should be sym- 
pathetic because they, too, are painters, but who 
are contemptuous because fundamentally ignorant 
of any method save their own. 

It is true that the actively contemptuous make 
up a relatively small body, but they are surrounded 
by a much larger body of those who are indifferent 

235 


236 THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTURE 


to anything save their own way of looking at art; 
from them the actively contemptuous make converts, 
while upon the public they exercise an influence in- 
variably unfortunate. The men of group A say of 
groups B and C, “‘ Their work is not worth consid- 
ering”; groups B and C each repeat the same re- 
garding the other two groups. The public listens, 
then argues: “If either one of these groups is right 
the two others are not worth considering. Now 
as we cannot know which of the three is right, our 
policy is clear; it is to not consider any of them, but 
to collect the works of the past instead of theirs.” 
Here is what happened in the late seventies. 
The Paris-Munich men came home and said: “The 
Hudson River School is weak, negligible.” The 
Hudson River School said: “These parvenus are 
un-American; they are imperfect imitators of Pa- 
risians; they are negligible.” The public said: “It 
appears, according to their own testimony, that they 
are all negligible’-—and American artists were neg- 
lected for twenty years after! During the last 
decade a robust sentiment has been growing up in 
favor of American art. How shall it be strength- 
ened? What is the remedy for that which occurred 
in 1880? Is it enthusiastic and indiscriminate lau- 
dation of each other’s work within the fraternity? 
Assuredly not; the remedy is culture, study of each 
other’s work and intelligent comprehension of each 
other’s aims and methods. From comprehension 


AnpReEw T. Scuwartz: “Justice” 


fr 


Ses: 


THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTURE 237 


will come first toleration, then intelligent admira- 
tion; and this admiration, wisely expressed, will help 
to establish what is worthy, since it is not sporadic 
notice of each other that really counts, but gradual 
infiltration of ideas. 

May I, in my talk about culture, go back for a 
moment to my first experience of evolution of the 
art idea in my early training, and return to No. 31 
Rue de Laval, the Atelier Bonnat? In those days 
I began just as a normal and reasonable art student 
should. I worried myself sick over what the mas- 
ter said or didn’t say, about my work; because I 
couldn’t get my figure plumb or my proportions 
right, because my color dried in, or because it 
would not dry fast enough. My little two-foot 
study was the most important thing in the world. 
I know from my own experience exactly how all that 
is—how natural, and in a way how right. 

Blessed be concentration! Without it the beginner 
cannot get along at all; and for a while at least the 
more he thinks about his own efforts and the less 
about other people’s the better. But when he does 
begin to think about other people’s work his mind 
will grow faster, his horizon widen more rapidly, if 
he will try not to condemn any methods merely be- 
cause they are not his. 

If he does not sometimes look about him and 
‘realize that other aspirations than his exist, he is in 
danger—from too long and close concentration—of 


238 THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTURE 


contracting a mental squint. In the very beginning — 
he is too busy to be uncharitable; too close to his 
own sheet of drawing-paper to see beyond it; his 
world is bounded by the school. But just a little 
later he is emancipated; and it was in the atelier, 
and from the more advanced men, who already had 
little studios of their own where they worked for 
one-half of the day, that I first learned what a paltry 
affair was anybody else’s art than ours as exem- 
plified by that of our master. However, when I 
heard the master himself talk, a new point of view 
was afforded, and a new vista opened. If A and B 
and C, the camarades, exalted our patron Bonnat 
and scoffed at D, E, and F, Bonnat himself admired 
and studied the latter trio. . 
This fact reached me only gradually, but at last 
I commenced to recognize it as phenomenal. In 
the intervals of work my French fellow students 
became mitrailleuses of criticism. I gathered from 
them that so and so, famous men, were artists of the 
neuvieme catégorie, the ninth class, not second or 
third, mind you. When I first arrived in Paris I 
had letters to Géréme and ambitions toward be- 
coming his pupil at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. He 
accepted me as candidate, but said: “It will be three 
months before you can enter, you must not lose time 
—go to Bonnat, there is no better man in France.” 
Now, if there were in the land two artists who dif- 
fered utterly in methods they were Géréme and 


THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTURE 239 


Bonnat. It was astonishing to me that the former 
should recommend the latter. But I went to him, 
and at the end of the three months did not wish to 
leave him. Indeed, when I looked at his powerful 
canvases and listened to the enthusiasm of his pupils 
I could even understand that Géréme realized his 
_ own feebleness as painter and Bonnat’s superiority 
sufficiently to send the pupil to him; it seemed gen- 
erous but natural. A year or so later I went to 
M. Bonnat’s studio for special advice of some kind. 
High on a ladder he was painting the sky in his 
“Assumption of the Virgin.” With a big brush 
loaded with orange-pink color he was beating the 
bright, strong blue of the sky with regular drum- 
like strokes, “tacking,’’ but it seemed almost like 
hammering, and compelled my admiration by its 
vigor. I asked my questions, and in relation to one 
of them he said: “Better go to Géroéme with that, 
al est bien bon garcon, and there is no better man in 
France to tell you.” 

Here was a surprise; these were the selfsame 
words that Géréme had used in relation to Bonnats 
To be sure, they referred to a different quality, but 
this vigorous handler of pigment was sending me to 
the smooth painter Gérdme! It was the apparent 
inconsistency that astonished me. I began to real- 
ize that here at least was affirmation that artists 
could in wholly differing ways be peers; it was a 
new impression and an illuminating one. Later I 


240 THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTURE 


found Puvis de Chavannes painting a decoration 
inscribed “To my friend Bonnat”’ upon the walls of 
the patron’s private hotel; Bonnat, in turn, doing 
Puvis’s portrait, and either artist praising the other 
to the skies. Young as I was, my experience had 
already bred questioning in me as to how far their 
respective pupils would follow this mutual admira- 
tion of two painters who differed radically in nearly 
all their processes. 

I began to see in the example of these men, 
Géréme, Bonnat, Puvis, far older than I, far wiser 
and each of them archfamous, that an artist might 
unswervingly follow one road and yet not doubt that — 
his friend upon another was just as earnest a pil- 
grim and just as directly headed for the goal. I 
commenced to realize that these roads would meet 
somewhere and began to conceive dimly of an at- 
tainable Ars Una. To have a solid perception of 
the unity of art is to own an invaluable property, 
and its possessor is in a sense grown up at once, an 
adult even though he still be struggling with the 
problems of school-life. But in its highest form 
this perception is the rarest of possessions; it be- 
longs in its utmost development only to the Titians 
and Velasquezes, the Rembrandts and Millets of 
this world, and is given to other men but in the 
descending scale of the proportion of their greatness. 
To be sure, almost any artist who has reached his 
third decade will admit that methods differing from 


THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTURE 241 


his own may be good, but many of them admit it only 
perfunctorily, and do not act as if they believed it. 

Even perfunctory admission is something, much 
indeed, for it is contempt of others that is dangerous. 
Contempt is a weed that grows fast and rank and 
high, and soon chokes everything else in the garden. 
I have said that with the beginner scepticism re- 
garding any other art-practice than his own is in 
some degree natural and not unhealthy; the child 
must have confidence in his own feet before he can 
walk freely, but there soon comes a time when it is 
seasonable to weed one’s garden, and to admit that 
the feet of others may tread paths divergent from 
ours, yet leading all the same to artistic salvation. 
The danger is that later, if the young man has not 
begun early to cast intelligent eyes upon other meth- 
ods than his own, he will commence to harden and 
will narrow until, in middle age, it will be impossible 
for him to turn outward those many appreciative 
facets for that reflection of nature as seen through 
the eyes of others, which has been essential to the 
very greatest artists. For the very greatest artists 
have been the most generously and widely cultured. 
I do not mean the men who have won the most de- 
grees or medals, but who have recognized what is 
largest and most general in life and art and nature, 
the Dantes, the Michelangelos, the Miltons, the 
Leonardos, and the Millets. The artist of the Re- 
naissance stood the centre of an unassailable trio, 


242 THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTURE 


his arms linked fast in those of science and literature _ 
on either side. Raphael, at the time of his death, — 
was not only a mural painter—and the mural 
painter must have one foot at least planted solidly 
upon science—he was also planning nothing less 
than a huge restoration of the city of ancient Rome. 
Architecture then as now was as much a science as 
an art, and the Renaissance architects thoroughly 
understood painting and sculpture in relation to 
their own work. Michelangelo, as we know, was 
‘the man with four souls,’ Leonardo was so all- 
embracing that we might account him a kind of 
spoiled child of Athene. Rembrandt, a bad business 
man, ruined himself as a collector. Rubens, more 
balanced, absolutely balanced indeed, profited by 
his own collections; was close to the learned, and 
distinguished himself as ambassador. Velasquez 
was majordomo of Philip IV., and master of such 
necessary pageants as royal marriages. And not 
only these giants but hundreds of other artists were 
prodigiously cultured. As you come down the cen- 
turies you still find that knowledge of, and respect 
for, the methods of others mark the most famous 
painters—Reynolds with his cultus of the Italians, 
Lawrence with his collection of drawings, Millet 
with his understanding of Michelangelo and Poussin. 


It is true that the artists of the Renaissance based 
all culture upon either the study of the ancients or 


Pittsburg, Pa. 


is 
S 
3 
Ala) 
oy 
Q, 
ea 
Oe 
G 
~ 
oe 
(2) 
ot 
oO 
be 
= 
ate 
O 
of 
oO 
p 
72) 
(eo) 
OQ, 
< 
o 
a 
~ 
re 


Frieze o 


TaBER SEARS 


pees 


ee ae 
ee al PK it 


ya er page 


if 


THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTURE 243 


else of a few immediate forerunners, who had founded 
their own practice, in turn, on what they believed to 
have been that of the Romans. With Vasari, the 
Renaissance public called the gothic masters of the 
North barbarous, and their prejudice against the 
latter lasted for three centuries and blinded people 
down past the days of Goethe, who shut his eyes 
tight (though they were beauty-loving eyes if 
ever such existed) to the frescoes of Assisi because 
Minerva beckoned to him more compellingly from 
further up the hill. But both Vasari and Goethe 
believed in culture passionately, and their neglect of 
the Gothic was caused, at least on Vasari’s part, far 
more by ignorance than by contempt. For that 
matter, it was the contempt of indifference rather 
than of active dislike, which in past ages fell upon 
superseded art. Lethe arose and covered with its 
waves the Italian primitives, the Giottos and Bot- 
ticellis and all the other early artists; and to our 
great advantage, since those waters of oblivion pre- 
served the tondi and panels and cassone fronts from 
restoration, and only a few masters, Titian, Cor- 
regeio, Raphael, and one or two more, were tall 
enough in reputation to remain emergent, and hence 
often to fare hardly at the hands of the over-painters. 
As for the gothic masters of medizval centuries, they 
almost lost track of their parentage in the turmoil 
of barbarian invasion. A little light flickered in 
the monasteries, and even in the darkest years there 


244 THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTURE 


never was a time when Aristotle was not a name to 
conjure with, or when there were not some men, 
tonsured or untonsured, who had heard of Horace 
and Cicero. But such names were only a faint echo 
from an otherwise forgotten past to nearly all who 
practised the graphic arts. 

The influence of Roman work passed ee to 
the Como masons, to Burgundian and Provengal 
monks; now and then a beam of light from By- 
zantium or Syria glanced down the steel line of the 
Crusaders as far as some church of Venice or Péri- 
gueux, but by the time of the cathedral-builders of 
the Ile-de-France, men worked in a changed world; 
they thought of the Romanesque only as a starting- 
point, of the Roman not at all; while five hundred 
years later the men of the bag-wig period, indifferent 
even to the early Renaissance, turned their backs 
squarely on the Middle Ages and their eyes once 
more toward the orders of Vitruvius. 


II 


We see, then, that the artists of the past were often 
innocently ignorant of their own parentage, and did 
not know whence they derived, even while trading 
successfully upon some paternal trait. But our age 
is eclectic beyond any other, and when we are igno- 
rant we are so by deliberate neglect. With us, pho- 
tography and facilitated transportation have brought 


THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTURE 245 


our far-away artist-cousins into our family of to- 
day. Any one of us may for a dime buy a reproduc- 
tion of a work of art better and more correct in its 
way than could be obtained for all his money by the 
richest art-loving nobleman in Europe travelling 
through Italy in the seventeenth or eighteenth cen- 
tury, with a whole retinue of servants, and in coaches 
that had been floated down rivers of France or Ger- 
many and carried piecemeal over the Alps on mule- 
back, to go home again filled with copper-plate en- 
gravings and hard-outline reproductions of statuary 
which seem preposterous to our modern eyes. To- 
day an intelligent schoolboy can, in a way, know 
more of Phidias or Praxiteles than could Michel- 
angelo or Benvenuto Cellini. 

Understand me clearly. I have repeated the words 
“in a way,” for in another way a Michelangelo or a 
Donatello was a seer and a prophet who could look, 
we may not doubt it, backward up the ages, and 
vaticinate over a poor Roman copy, finding mighty 
stimulus in what had been but a borrowed thought, 
a reflection of a light, which, hidden from Michel- 
angelo behind horizons or under earth, shines for us 
to-day, dimmed perhaps by stains and breakage, yet 
in the original handiwork of a great Hellene. There- 
fore, there is no excuse for us if we feel contempt 
for other ways than ours; history, archeology, pho- 
tography, travel teach us that many methods are 
peers and invaluable. If we even shrug our shoulders 


246 THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTURE 


gently over anything artistic that has completely 
developed, it is not quite well with us; then what 
shall we say of those post-impressionists who spit 
upon the past, declaring that the ancient masters 
existed only to show us what to avoid? 

To-day learned men explain to us both the Greek 
and the Gothic; if we see the glory of Titian’s color, 
we know, too, the still greater glory of the glass of 
Chartres and Bourges. In looking on the sparkling 
splendor of Veronese’s and Tiepolo’s canvases, we 
can remember the solemn splendor of the mosaics of 
Ravenna and the Palatine Chapel. We may be 
personally all devotion to one school; we cannot for- 
get that another beside it has flourished in the sun- 
shine of sincere popular favor—popular, that is, in 
the largest and best sense. Do we bow to a cultus 
of the ugly which we call the strong and the true? 
Truly Goya is magnificent, but how about the 
“Venus of Milo”? Is she feeble, is she artificial? 
Or if we cry out with Winckelmann for Greek deities, 
how about Rembrandt? Is he not also divine? We 
must not abuse Correggio for loving great starry eyes 
and filling cupolas with elfin or godlike presences, 
simply because we see in the distance Chardin coming 
along with his loaf of bread and his slice of cheese, and 
love him, too. Yes, it is quite true, as Ruskin says, 
that a German may be as solemnly and devoutly 
contemplative of a lemon-pip and a cheese-paring as 
an Italian is of a Madonna in glory; but it is the 


THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTURE 247 


contemplativeness of either which is his invaluable 
possession, and, as to varying mental attitudes, the 
more our light is broad-flung over great surfaces the 
more crannies, too, it will illuminate, and the better 
it will be for us, the more the illumination will beat 
back into our hearts and minds. While the gods 
and giants file along the frieze of the great altar of 
Pergamus, men and maidens, pages and cooks and 
scullions, too, pass us panelled upon wood or copper 
by the hands of the “‘little Dutchmen,” and before 
these giants and pygmies alike we may say: “Stand, 
ye are perfect.” Our ignorance of a certain phase 
of art does not cancel it; Madonna is as beau- 
tiful potentially in the darkness at night in the 
museum-gallery as by day; on the morrow morn- 
ing we may admire her again, if we will. Think for 
a moment how the general enthusiasm has always 
come in waves, waxing and subsiding. Forty years 
ago Rubens was a giant in name, as he is now and 
always shall be; but people thought comparatively 
little about a certain contemporary and friend of 
Rubens, who had been Philip IV.’s majordomo, 
painted royal portraits, and was named Velasquez. 
By and by the French masters praised him to 
their pupils, and Mr. Stevenson began to write 
of him, and Sir Walter Armstrong and Mr. Claude 
Phillips and Mr. Ricketts followed suit; until, just 
as in the sixteenth century the Spanish court 
brought black into fashion of dress all over Europe, 


248 THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTURE 


so in Munich and Paris the black and white 
pictures came to the fore, and upon the occasion of 
any argument, despite Whistler’s query, every one 
dragged in Velasquez. Rubens was in the shade 
for the moment and the hispaniolated art-lover 
maintained that Velasquez was far greater than 
Titian; surely in unprofitable discussion, for who 
cares whether Mount Dhawalaghiri or Mount 
Kinchinjunga is a few score of feet the higher? If 
you step backward and view the Himalayas in their 
chain, or art in its succession, you cannot tell 
among the tallest which ‘s overtopping. 


ie 4 


Per ad 


D4 
HAVE WE AS YET A STYLE? 


Ir travel and the improved reproduction of pic- 
tures have made us familiar with the famous exam- 
ples of the latter, have we, after so much admiration, 
- observation, and sometimes imitation of the art of 
the past, anything to-day at all approaching a style? 
We can at least afirm that we have some strongly 
marked tendencies. Much writing has been devoted 
to the discussion of the question of an epochal style 
in art; that is to say, a dominating style of a period 
growing gradually out of a preceding style, lapsing 
gradually into a succeeding one, and so imposing 
itself that every artist worked along its lines as nat- 
urally as a man walking through an open country 
would keep to the hard, beaten, easy road. Excur- 
sions afield he might make, and the greater the artist 
the more likely he would be to overstep the common 
path, but he could never wholly get away from it. 
Boucher might be frivolous, Fragonard joyously in- 
decorous, Chardin grave, homely, and recueilli, Cochin 
intensely serious with his little engraved profiles, 


Moreau almost classic in the beauty of compositions 
251 


252 HAVE WE AS YET A STYLE? 


which yet are heaped up with falbalas and coquet- 
tish accessories with nonsensical appellations, but 
with one and all of these men you feel the century, 
eighteenth in name, the epoch of starch and powder, 
of wig and patch and hoop and high heels. And it 
is so with earlier centuries; we see the dryness (de- 
lightful to live with, for all that it is dry and hard) 
of the fifteenth-century Primitives, loosening and 
expanding in the work of the Roman school, gor- 
geously full-blown in that of the Venetians, as the 
sap of antiquity at the roots of art begins to run 
again. Then we note returning hardness, stiffer, 
darker costumes, black armors even, as the hand of 
Spain closes upon Italy, a hardness which, unluckily, 
does not bring back with it the precision of fifteenth- 
century dryness, until a little later we see seicento 
writ large in the very faces of saints and nymphs 
alike. We may well call such gradually changing 
interpretations of nature “styles,”’ but when we come 
to our own time we should be hard put to attempt 
such denomination. Probably our successors, when 
far enough removed, will recognize our character- 
istics, but they will not be so marked and persistent 
as those of the past. 

Nor is this because we have sharpness of sudden 
contrast. Our ladies, who abruptly drop voluminous 
drapery and appear to be clothed in an enlarged 
lamp-wick, tight, cylindrical, even-sided, are, after 
all, not much more suddenly transformed than was 


(epunjo1 jo sioid oY4i JO suo 0} sATjUapuad) “UUITY 


[ned 3G ‘JoudeD viosouupy oy ur poueg ,,"JSaMYWON oy) Jo uoNeziyIA oY.L,,, iSNOWWIS GuVAMayy 


SUw0umm1~s pavapy ko 2ysrsh o> 


HAVE WE AS YET A STYLE? 253 


a Reécamier or a Beauharnais, svelte and low- 
crowned, just emergent from the enormous hoop of 
a Marie Antoinette, and from under the huge tower 
of hair and ribands and feathers which (we may 
quote an author of the time) made a woman’s face 
appear to be just midway between her heels and 
the top of her coiffure. Even as early as the four- 
teenth century had come an equally sudden and 
prodigious change, when men—for this time it was 
with warriors, not women, that the fashion altered 
most—came down from their saddles to fight on 
foot, threw off the gown that reached the heels, 
put on the short, padded doublet, the juste-au-corps, 
the tight-to-the-body, the ancestor of the jersey, 
and when the knights at Nicopolis hacked off their 
long-toed shoes with their own swords in order to 
stand firmly on their feet. No, we are not the only 
people who have made sudden changes, but the 
sudden changes of the past were not directly imitated 
as ours are. We run a gamut of costume skilfully 
varied by dressmakers fortified with study of an- 
tique examples, and I cannot believe that, with our 
enormous opportunity for eclecticism, we shall ever 
have such gradually evolved and distinctly charac- 
terized styles as the earlier centuries have known. 
As it is with dress so it is, to a certain extent at 
least, with the graphic arts. We have been shown 
so much that we inevitably recognize and remem- 
ber many kinds of excellence and admit them as 


254 HAVE WE AS YET A STYLE? 


such. Partisans some of us will be, but in the main 
a good deal of catholicity is sure to be bred. 

You may say, people have never agreed much. 
I reply, people have never had such a chance to 
agree before, and to accept so many kinds of things, 
for they have never before been so juxtaposed with 
the concrete message, not only with infinitely re- 
duplicated and admirable reproductions of art works, 
but with the originals. Facility and cheapness of 
transportation have brought the latter near; for in 
spite of reproductions, Mohammed must still go to 
the mountain, the great original. But, with five- 
day steamers and aeroplanes, perhaps, in the future, 
Mohammed may visit so many mountains in a short 
time that admiration and understanding of varied 
kinds of good things will become possible. Some one 
has said that, whether we agree or disagree with 
Darwin, we can no longer reflect upon certain sub- 
jects without doing so at least in terms of Darwin- 
ism. ‘This application has been passed onward fe- 
licitously to the system of Morelli in art expertism. 
Whether Morelli was right or wrong in specific in- 
stances, we cannot to-day conceive of a situation in 
expertism which should wholly ignore him. When 
we are studying the authorship of old pictures, we — 
are bound to think of certain things in terms of Mo- 
rellianism; his theories have opened so many ordered 
vistas that our eyes are bound to ’ follow them instead 
of straying. | 


HAVE WE AS YET A STYLE? 25 


And to-day we could not fix our mental eyes upon 
any focal point which should become pivotal to the 
evolution of a style. We could not forget what 
has been shown us in delightful but confusing quan- 
tity. In the past, single-mindedness sometimes came 
from dearth of knowledge. For instance, toward 
the end of the twelfth century, when the aspiration 
of the whole city flamed up into the desire and the 
will to build a minster, the knight or merchant or 
beggar, who pushed a barrow, the noble lady who 
tied her long swinging sleeves into bags for carrying 
heavy stones, the child who brought water to slake 
the lime for the workers, never thought for one mo- 
ment about Greek temple or Roman basilica, or 
Egyptian or Assyrian sculpture. They did not know 
anything whatever about them; they only knew 
that there in Chartres or Paris or Rheims they 
were all very busy rebuilding a low-browed heavy 
church, which we, not they, would call Romanesque, 
into a lofty cage of masonry full of huge windows 
and running as far up into the air as stone construc- 
tion would permit. 

To-day when we build a cathedral we are plagued 
by our souvenirs and wonder whether we shall make 
it “Romanesque” or ‘‘Gothic” or “Renaissance.” 
Whatever we do make and whatever we call it, we 
may be sure that it will in a way resemble some 
famous building of the past—and why should it not? 
In the arts one thing is born of another as surely as 


256 HAVE WE AS YET A STYLE? 


man is born of woman. Said John La Farge to me 
several years ago: “If a pupil tells me that he has 
done something wholly original, 1 do not want to 
see it.” | 

To-day when we decorate a building with mural 
painting we must follow in somebody else’s footsteps. 
They may have trodden the rock of the Acropolis © 
or the sands of Asia Minor to enter the cella of a 
Greek temple, or they may have trudged the po- 
lygonal pavement of a fifteenth-century Florentine 
street, but wherever we go somebody’s footprints 
will underlie ours. We may climb upon the scaffold 
after Giotto in Padua to study simplicity in decora- 
tion; or we may go a few hundred feet further down 
the streets of the same little city and clamber after 
Mantegna up his ladders to admire the dry, nervous 
draughtsmanship of one of the noblest of stylists; 
or in some convent’s refectory, we may humbly try 
to gather up a few crumbs that fell from the abun- 
dance of Veronese’s banquet; but wherever we pass 
we shall find that some one else’s paint-box has been 
there before ours. ; 

And there is nothing in all this to discourage one; 
nothing to avoid. It is natural, evolutionary, and 
fecundating. The artist who worries most about 
being individualistic is least likely to become so. A 
fellow-worker once said to me: “We should try to 
be spontaneous.”” Now, he who. tries to be sponta- 
neous and to lift himself by the straps of his boots 


sainsy jo sdnoig asiv] ul pasn jesjsod 9y} jo sjdwexy 


"eq ‘odie q-SONTTIM, 


‘asnopy-1inoy AJUNOD ouUIOZNT oy} Ul jouRg ,,"Y[BOMUOUIWIOD ¥v Jo ZUIUDYVMY OY T,,, :ADIGANG “T, “AL 


“ 


6061 ‘Aazpaus *[ 44 ho 2u8:2kfon 


e 


# 
» 
PS ’ 
i 
t 
’ 
x 
‘ 
* 
a ae: 
nT y 7 


HAVE WE AS YET A STYLE? = 257 


is certain of only one thing—exhaustion. On the 
contrary, he who looks and learns and lingers need 
not fear, if he really be an artist (if he be not, why! 
of that kind, “‘non ragioniam di lor’’), that his fol- 
lowing footsteps will lead him away from himself. 
On the contrary, he will find himself; a self strength- 
ened by his contact with the healthy art of others; 
he need not fear, because if he have a real personal- 
ity, no matter how much he looks at the work of 
the old Italian, he cannot possibly be anything but 
an American, since his temperament, if he have one, 
is part of himself, and therefore of his race. 


deme 5 


LUT 


Oo 
Vir. 


ION OF PRESENT PRACTICE 


XI 
EVOLUTION OF PRESENT PRACTICE 


I 


By the time that the World’s Fair of Chicago 
closed its gates, it was evident that America would 
attempt to take up the succession of the older 
nations in mural painting. We have in earlier chap- 
ters considered decoration as a form of artistic en- 
deavor, described some of its processes, and enu- 
merated some of the difficulties which confront both 
architect and mural painter. We shall now rather 
discuss decoration as applicable to American needs 


and shall try to consider some of the direct or indi- 


rect derivatives of our contemporaneous decorative 
practice. Our present practice in mural painting in 
America is composite in its origin. Our technic 
was acquired in the main in Paris ateliers, and it is 
applied to the creation of wall paintings which derive 
largely from study of the Italian work of the Renais- 
sance, and which in turn is in some cases modified by 
admiration for the art of Puvis de Chavannes. 

Our wall paintings are almost invariably done in 


oil upon canvas, since true fresco has hardly been 
261 


262 EVOLUTION OF PRESENT PRACTICE 


attempted in America; nevertheless fresco with its — 
clear light character of effect has influenced us not a 
little, particularly through the practice of Puvis, 
who felt its charm profoundly, though he himself 
worked in oils. The beginning of our opportunity 
was coincidental with the greatest celebrity of that 
artist, who, after years of indifference on the part of 
the public, suddenly came into his own with his 
decorations in the Panthéon relating to the life of — 
St. Geneviéve, his work for Amiens, and a little 
later his beautiful hemicycle of the Sorbonne. 

His example was a valuable lesson in what one 
might call thinking poetically in color upon large 
surfaces—above all in a noble simplicity. He did 
us some good and some harm; at times I am tempted 
to think much harm. He was a man to study, not 
to imitate. Many modern painters, French or 
American, have imitated or tried to imitate him 
without studying him very seriously. Instead of 
studying him they have looked hard, too hard at him. 

Real extension of sympathy in either pupil or 
public, sympathy which teaches them to lift their 
eyes, comes rather from turning them to right and 
left than from staring at one focal light until they 
are hypnotized by it. To hitch your wagon to a star 
is wise, for the distance gives perspective. In the 
study of Titian, Correggio, Rembrandt, Veronese, 
lie little peril and much reward. These great painters 
came so long before us that they lived in an atmos- 


939][07) UlOpMog 
fAloT[WD) IV JOA AA 9} JO I[NGNS9A dy} UI UONeIODOq =, “SII JOPT 3UIDOIOIG IUdIOL[,, :+WAAVH], ‘H LLoaay 


‘¢ 


Pee 


EVOLUTION OF PRESENT PRACTICE 263 


phere of different conditions. Our conditions are 
so separated from theirs that they safeguard us from 
the possibility of feeble imitation. But if we try to 
hitch our wagon to the light which blazes close to 
our eyes, we may find that we have followed not a 
star but a meteor. 

_ This danger of lingering under a great contem- 
poraneous light, instead of praying and working for 
light of our own, is exemplified especially by the dev- 
otees of Puvis. I have seen forty men at least who 
made forty shipwrecks for themselves in imitating 
him; and if you consider minor lights you will find 
that each year the task of the member of an ex- 
hibition jury is made a burden to him by the young 
painters who imitate some brilliant contemporary 
cleverly, attaining to all his lesser qualities and 
falling just so far short of his greater ones, that 
their pictures cannot at first be distinguished from 
the master’s second-rate work. 

When a great artist breaks the way, if you struggle 
along his path at a respectful distance, whether of 
time or space, you may note the proportions of his 
achievement and profit by them. If you follow 
closely in his every footstep, you will remain in his 
shadow forever. What proved at once most illumi- 
nating and misleading, in the example of Puvis de 
Chavannes, was the extraordinarily successful effect 
which he achieved in the Panthéon in Paris by 
constantly repeating or re-echoing in his work the 


264 EVOLUTION OF PRESENT PRACTICE 


cool light-colored masonry of which the whole build- 
ing was constructed. 

Other qualities in the artist’s work were as im- 
portant, and perhaps even more fundamental to 
his contribution, but this quality was the most 
obvious. It sprang from a wise realization that, if 
you wish your decoration to cling to the walls of a 
building like a great drapery, like an epidermis even, 
you must marry it to the masonry by interfusion of 
tonality and color. He reapprehended a truth which 
had been partially forgotten or slighted, but which 
was patent to the old masters, namely, that true 


decoration is but a continuity of the surrounding — 


masonry, not spots plastered upon it, whether made 
up of painted scenes or ornament. This success was 
so obvious that press and public celebrated it eagerly. 
It even caused a rival of Puvis to be subjected to 
rather unjust criticism. 

For M. Jean Paul Laurens painted upon a neighbor- 
ing wall another series of decorations, also referring to 
St. Geneviéve; in them he used the strong and heavy 
colors special to his art. At once the public fell upon 


him, saying, “How inferior he is to Puvis!” and 


therein were unjust. To have said that as decorator 
Puvis had shown greater feeling and better judgment 
would have been quite correct, but in other important 
qualities of distribution of masses, arrangement of 
pattern, juxtaposition of what the French call les 
pleins et les vides, filled and empty spaces, Laurens 


EVOLUTION OF PRESENT PRACTICE 265 


was a great decorator in his way. (Soon after 
they were painted I made rough small copies of both 
their decorations and verified my impressions. These 
two cycles date from more than thirty years ago; 
M. Laurens afterwards apparently changed his atti- 
tude completely in relation to decorative tonal- 
ity and spacing. His large canvas, recently placed 
in the Capitole at Toulouse, is diffuse and scattered 
as to spots, and if compared with his work in the 
Panthéon is light in general tonality.) 

Now, if the French public, inclusive of the artists, 
somewhat misapprehended and exaggerated the 
office of light coloration in the work of Puvis, it is 
not surprising that we follow suit in America; all 
the more that many of our contemporaneous Amer- 
ican mural painters had worked in Parisian ateliers 
as young students. We all made the mistake of 
thinking that Puvis’s method, admirably suited to 
certain kinds of building, was suited to every kind— 
that it and it only was decoration. But there is no 
such thing as absolutism in art—everything is rela- 
tive; no matter how long continued, how static, a 
certain system of decoration may appear in history, 
we shall find if we watch it that it is in a condition 
of flux. The same laws are applicable to stagnation 
here as elsewhere. Puvis’s decoration, delightfully 
suited to a certain sort of interior, would not have 
fitted another kind. As we stand before the light, 
even gay tonality of some of the churches of Lom- 


266 EVOLUTION OF PRESENT PRACTICE 


bardy—Santa Maria at Saronno is a peculiarly in- 
teresting instance—we feel in looking at the charm- 
ing panels of Luini, the delicate colors of Lanini, the 
almost rollicking angels of Gaudenzio Ferrari, play- 
ing away, a whole domeful of them, overhead, that 
Puvis’s work might have figured worthily among 
them. Indeed—let us occasionally give the modern 
master his due—Puvis would have “bettered his in- 
structions.” Though he might not in his heads have 
approached the loveliness, sometimes consummate 
though more often insipid, of Luini’s madonnas and 
maidens, the Frenchman’s sense of distribution of 
masses would never have tolerated the overloaded 
confusion upon the walls of Luini’s show church of 
San Maurizio in Milan, to say nothing of the huge 
fresco at Lugano. Certainly Puvis’s work recalls 
not only that of the fourteenth century, but the 
light, clear tonality of the Lombard group; and 
when I first had the honor of meeting him I ven- 
tured in my youthful enthusiasm to recall this sug- 
gestion, thinking it to be a compliment to any man. 
“Believe me, sir,” he replied, “I have never even 
seen the works of those gentlemen” (ces messieurs). 

M. Puvis was the soul of courtesy, indeed of 
courtliness, but his answer had a slight savor of 
asperity. “Ma pur si muove,” I thought to myself. 
“The Luinis which were in my mind are in the newly 
arranged room of the Louvre, recently much noticed 
by the public, and through which you pass fre- 


Copyright by Louis C. Tiffany 


Louis C. Trrrany: Tiffany Chapel, crypt of Cathedral of 
St. John the Divine 


49 


EVOLUTION OF PRESENT PRACTICE 267 


quently.”” This I, however, did not say tohim. The 
feeling and method of Puvis de Chavannes were 
absolutely suited to the great gray Panthéon, and 
he prepared his own surroundings in Amiens and at 
the Sorbonne. When he painted his decorations for 
Boston he was old, near the end of his life, dreaded 
a sea voyage, and did not come to America. Had he 
done so, I am convinced, that, confronted as he 
would have been by yellow Siena marble instead of 
his beloved gray surfaces, he would have modified 
the tone of some of his blues. 

Lovely as the work is, especially in the side 
panels, I can still pass up-stairs anticipatively, even 
from the presence of this great French decorator, to 
the always stimulating work of Mr. Sargent. Never- 
theless we should feel proud that through the initi- 
ative of McKim we possess an important series of 
canvases by the painter of the loveliest of modern 
decorations, the Hémicycle of the Sorbonne. Im- 
mediately after it, and indeed not after it in some 
respects, comes, in my opinion, the beautiful decora- 
tion by John La Farge in the Church of the Ascen- 
sion, in New York. It has not had as much influence 
upon us as the work of Puvis, because the manner of 
it is so quiet that in its perfectness it offers no handle 
for the imitator to grasp. Besides leaving to us his 
splendid glass, La Farge has done other work in dec- 
orative painting, but my own admiration reverts 
with most pleasure to his “Ascension.”’ 


268 EVOLUTION OF PRESENT PRACTICE 


IT 


To return to our American practice: we, all of us, 
decided that the fundamental property of decora- 
tive painting was to be its lightness of coloration, 
and we said many wise things about its “clinging 
to the wall” and “‘not making a hole.” We forgot 
that a gray wall surrounded by gray columns and 
capitals and cornices, in the Panthéon, for instance, 
was wholly different from a wall set with the richly 
carved woodwork of sixteenth-century churches, the 
deeply cut caissons of Venetian ceilings, even the 
delicate sculpture or intarsia of fifteenth-century 
Tuscany and Umbria. Sometimes the old Italians 
worked in very cheap material, and put all their 
money into the painted surface. They gave to 


Giotto in Padua, to Botticelli and Michelangelo in 


the Sistine Chapel, just huge boxes of plastered stone 
with some holes knocked in them for windows. To 
Tiepolo in the Labbia Palace the same sort of in- 


terior was accorded. The artists turned these rough 


places into dreams of beauty. In other cases the 
Italians used gold and dark woods in profusion and 
lavished rich marbles. Here was an opportunity for 


quite another treatment; and when Perugino or 
Veronese or Tiepolo entered such an interior with 
his assistants and his working-drawings he adapted — 


himself and his tonalities at once to this different 
and richer surrounding. 


EVOLUTION OF PRESENT PRACTICE 269 


We ’prentice hands here in America twenty- 
five years ago remembered Puvis’s Panthéon, and 
thought that all decoration should be ultra-light in 
tone, forgetting, or rather not foreseeing, that the 
building commissioners in various States might like 
the native marbles for their capitols, and where rich- 
ness of color existed in any local vein might very 
naturally encourage its exploitation. I recall the 
pride with which, filled as I was with this obsession 
of pale coloration, I showed to visitors that upon a 
certain one of my decorative panels a spot of pure 
yellow ochre looked almost a blot of ink. My pride 
in that performance has wholly departed, and it is 
probable that some of my comrades have shared 
my experience and my disillusionment. A further 
study of decoration has shown me that even upon a 
white surface it is not necessary to follow closely the 
example of Puvis. As one wanders through those 
exquisite rooms of the archives at the Hotel de Sou- 
bise, to quote an example accessible to all, in the 
heart of Paris, and then remembers many other 
hotels of the epoch of the dainty, of hair powder and 
red heels, one realizes that Natoire and Lemoyne and 
the rest of them were not one bit afraid of color— 
light, if you will, but clear, strong, and pansbersG 
and never grayed into flat opacity. 

The fact remains that we learned much of Pirie 
and may still profit greatly by his example, provided 
we keep in mind that his is only one of a number of 


much — to a discussion of suis d 


. 


as thus Pe developed, he his pill pa : 


XII 


INFLUENCE OF THE FIFTEENTH AND 
SIXTEENTH CENTURIES 


XII 


INFLUENCE OF THE FIFTEENTH AND 
SIXTEENTH CENTURIES 


I 


THERE are some lovers of mural painting, and very 
cultivated lovers too, whose culture has not elimi- 
nated prejudice, who affirm that the work of the 
Italian fifteenth century is the expression of the last 
really decorative style, or who maintain that Puvis’s 
painting alone is mural; or who, in some alcove 
of the eighteenth century, say that there only may 
be found the truly exquisite exemplar of decora- 
tion. They are those, in short, who would adopt a 
style and proclaim all others illegitimate. But why 
to-day, since we have no characteristic style, stop 
short with any style whatever? What would have 
become of art if others had stopped; why break off 
with Puvis and the nineteenth century, or with 
Pinturicchio and Perugino in the fifteenth, why not 
with Giotto in Padua of the fourteenth; why not 
with the stucco reliefs in the Baths of Diocletian; 
why not have stopped once for all with the sculptors 
of Abydos? Where would Perugino and Pinturicchio 
or Veronese or Puvis have been if men had not 

273 


274 INFLUENCE OF FIFTEENTH 


loosened the conventional bonds of Egypt, and 
Byzantium had not followed Rome, and medizval 
masons come after Romanesque monks? He who 
declares that any one style is right and departure 
from it wrong, is blocking the chariot-wheels of art. 
There are people who would reply to this: “We 
do not wish to interfere with the roll of the chariot- 
wheels. Let them continue down the broad road of — 
the general development of art; we only say that 
here (in the fifteenth century, for instance) the branch 
road of the truly decorative ends.” In making 
their distinction, let these objectors note the fol- 
lowing: When Gozzoli, Ghirlandajo, Botticelli, Peru- 
gino, Pinturicchio, and the others practised a certain 
kind of painting in their decorations, they painted in 
exactly the same way in their easel pictures, their 
altar-pieces, and their portraits; and just as soon 
and just as fast as they learned to broaden their por- 
traits and easel pictures, they put precisely the same 
breadth into their decorative painting. They never 
had any doubt at all as to what they ought to do; 
they proposed to develop as rapidly as they might, 
and I do not think that we can logically bisect them, 
letting half their art progress and the other half re- 
main fixed upon the vaulting as the last legitimate 
decoration. The style of Perugino and Pinturicchio 
is very beautiful, and may be used with great ad- 
vantage in America, but it is not final; no style is. 
Pinturicchio’s vogue had come partly from the 


orpnys STU UI SJUP SISSY YIM SULYIOM 4ISTIB 9Yy sutmoyg 


9SNO}FI-1INO-) purleAz) 344 Io} UOI}RIOIIC] Poa J1O,J UO qdnessy out SUIYIIE MA uo]suUlYsE A ,, *HaNAN T Ae Sa) 


AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES 275 


fascinating and sensational restoration made in con- 
nection with the Papal Jubilee, and at the Pope’s 
own expense, of the decorations in the Borgia apart- 
ments of the Vatican. These latter in a consider- 
able measure focalized the decorative tendencies of 
the Italian fifteenth century, and exhibited them 
under a peculiarly brilliant light in the frescoes of 
Pinturicchio. In relation to this work, just as to 
that of Puvis, we may heartily sympathize with 
those who have admired and used it, may warmly 
approve it as one of the most excellent systems of 
decoration, and may still emphatically protest against 
those who say, “Now this I call real decoration” 
with the inference that broader and later methods 
are not truly decorative. Of course, it is true dec- 
oration, this work of Perugino and Pinturicchio, 
and very beautiful decoration; to lose it would 
deprive us of some of the world’s chief treasure. 
But why not admit its logical succession, why tarry 
among the grotesques of the Vatican, and refuse 
to pass on into the Stanze with their greater artistic 
breadth and freedom, their more advanced and de- 
veloped art; why remain with the entrancing rich- 
ness, the formalized ultramarine and gold of Pinturic- 
chio’s vaulting to the Borgia apartments, and refuse 
to accept as equally true decoration those canvases 
of Veronese (or his school, who cares?) in the Sala del 
Collegio of the Ducal Palace in Venice, which, when 
seen at the right hour in their deep ceiling caissons, 


276 INFLUENCE OF FIFTEENTH 


fairly smoulder and glow with color? In one case, 
that of Pinturicchio, the surface vibrates from the 
juxtaposition of little spots of gold and pigment, of 
tiny relieved bits, of embossed pattern of belt or 
drapery; even, and very essentially, at times, from 
beautiful, accidental disintegration, and flaking away 
of the paint. In the other case, that of Veronese, 
the canvas pulsates and palpitates under the brush 
work. The effect is very nearly as rich, and is, on 
the whole, the result of a more masterly influence. 
The wise decorator will study both styles and profit 
by each of the two without prejudice to the other. 

One very valuable property, especially to Amer- 
icans, of the style of Pinturicchio and the fifteenth- 
century artists nearest akin to him, is that it is a 
safe style to begin with in a young school of paint- 
ing—much safer than that of the sixteenth century, 
because much easier to handle well. In such rooms 
as those of the Cambio at Perugia, the Mantuan 
palaces, or many others in different cities, the archi- 
tect himself has worked over the composition of line 
and space so much that it is left to the painter and 


sculptor to only, as it were, continue and amplify 


his patterns, and by just so much the task of painter 
and sculptor becomes easier. The frame of mould- 
ings presented by the architect can stiffen and hold 
up and almost make easy a quite adequate decora- 
tion, where drawing and modelling, which are rela- 
tively inferior, pass muster easily within such a 


ew 


AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES = 277 


splendid formal setting. In the Cambio, a great 
master; in the Sienese Libreria, a fertile, splendor- 
loving decorator immortalized the work, but in 
hundreds of rooms in Italy the same kind of formal- 
ized framing was filled out with grotesques and little 
figures and landscapes, powdered with gold or de- 
pendent wholly on pigment, and the painting was 
carried through by practically unknown men, yet 
with almost as much effect as was obtained in the 
rooms by Perugino and Pinturicchio. 

This effect comes from the fact that the fifteenth- 
century painter thought first and last of his room as 
a whole, as a piece of architectonic completeness. 
It is as a lesson in the latter direction that the fol- 
lowing of guatirocento art in America deserves high 
praise. Some of those who have followed it have 
achieved beautiful and exceptionally satisfactory re- 
sults, and deserve our gratitude for their steadying 
and truly artistic influence—their solid contribution. 


When the practice of art takes on a form new to 
the country in which it occurs, it is only natural 
to practitioners and public to refer at once to times 
and places in the past when and where the aforesaid 
form was in vogue. Thus when the Boston Public 
Library and the Chicago Exhibition called the at- 
tention of the public to mural painting, our Amer- 
ican eyes reverted at once to Italy. In Puvis de 
Chavannes we saw the influence of the fourteenth 


278 INFLUENCE OF FIFTEENTH 


century, in Pinturicchio’s Borgia apartments the 
influence of the fifteenth; there remained also to be 
reckoned with, as a stimulus, the decorative paint- 
ing of the culminating period, as shown in the work 
of the sixteenth century. 

About the year fifteen hundred Renaissance art 
came of age, the adolescent period was past; the 
practice of decoration was centred and focussed in 
Rome, whence but a little later it shifted to Venice. 
After and even while Pinturicchio and Ghirlandajo 
painted, there were younger artists who were be- 


ginning to breathe deeper and ask for more and 


freer wall-space. It was still the time of the very 
protagonists of guatirocento decoration; Botticelli, 
Perugino, Roselli, stood upon the scaffolding of the 
Sistine Chapel as alternating masters of the works. 
It was the heyday of their art, which had reached 
its zenith. It was the period of the Sala del Cambio 
in Perugia, of the Borgia apartments in the Vatican, 
the Libreria of Siena, when the pupil assistants 
(Michelangelo Buonarotti himself was among them 
as garzone of the botiega of Ghirlandajo) were 
gathering up all the most lovely decorative acces- 
sories of the Renaissance, the scrolls and vines and 
candelabra and romping panthers and nereids and 
cupids, and were disposing them about the figure 
compositions of their masters. It was the moment 
of the final, the richest, and in some respects the 
‘most admirable exemplification of a delightfully 


ss 


ee eS eee ee ee ee ee es 


AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES — 279 


decorative treatment of the walls. But already the 
protagonists began to realize that their road was 
widening. They had learned their lesson in per- 
spective and anatomy; in the application of dec- 
orative detail they had turned their kaleidoscope 
over and over again to the creation of unending com- 
binations of lovely pattern. They had diverged 
from the fourteenth-century road of Giotto, with its 
larger because simpler significance, and now they 
began instinctively to turn back to it again. 

Perugino, the arranger of scrolls and medallions, 
the creator of strange decorative detail of helmets 
like chandeliers, and shields like ornamental box- 
lids; Botticelli, the illustrator of Dante; Ghirlandajo, 
the goldsmith—all began to feel the need of more 
elbow-room (Ghirlandajo indeed had longed for the 
town walls of Florence to cover with decoration). 
In painting the great rectangular compositions of 
the lower walls of the Sistina, these hierophants of 
fifteenth-century art carried as far as their develop- 
ment would compass, exactly what their partisans 
to-day look askance at in the practice of Veronese 
and Tintoretto and Tiepolo. 

Probably the humanist, the scholar, is to a certain 
extent answerable for the earliest ventures. It is pos- 
sible enough that Botticelli at first pushed his bark 
somewhat timorously out upon the waters of a wider 
experience, but without doubt a feeling for greater 
breadth, even in the superficial space accorded to 


280 INFLUENCE OF FIFTEENTH 


pictorial composition, was in the air. Signorelli’s 
‘trumpets, sounding the Last Judgment in the Cathe- 
dral of Orvieto, sounded also the initial flourish to 
the triumphal march of sixteenth-century art. When 
he painted “The Blessed” and “The Damned,” he 
might tuck episodes, scenes from the Divina Com- 
media down into the spandrel’s point, and work them 
into a decorative pattern with scrolls and scutcheons; 
but when he came to his main subjects he felt that 
he wanted for each one no broken wall with lu- 
nettes and tondi, but a whole vast side of the Brizzi 
Chapel, just as Veronese, three-quarters of a century 
later, would have claimed the entire end of a refec- 
tory for a Marriage of Cana in Galilee. 

Great men had been born, and were now working 
as apprentices, who were to be even unreasonably im- 
patient of ornament. For such impatience is dan- 
gerous, and only the Signorellis and Michelangelos 
of this world can be contemptuous of decorative 
accessory without peril to themselves. Michel- 
angelo cared so much for the human body that he 
rarely averted his eyes from it in favor of anything 
else in nature; but when all is said, his curiously in- 
volved head-dresses and his braided coiffures testify 
to his ability, when he chose to use ornament, even 
if he did think it unworthy of his time and skill, as 
long as he could make patterns of his mighty bodies, 
for that is what Michelangelo and Raphael, too, did 
with the personages of their action. They deliber- 


Jourd aAnviodaq = d1UDIg BY ],,, :LNVITIVA GIAVG SINO'T 


AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES 281 


ately made them into great decorative patterns. 
Correggio also was inclined to shake off the bonds of 
ornament, and wear, as it were, only loose garlands. 
He trellised his cupids of San Paolo, and let his babies 
look out from oval bowers of leaves, free from any 
risk of catching their feet or hands in the tangle of 
curling tendrils to formalized scrolls. He spread 
feather-beds of clouds for the Apostles, who recline 
and sometimes sprawl upon the pendentives of San 
Giovanni Evangelista, and he filled the dome of the 
Cathedral of Parma with naked bodies. Possibly, 
no one cut loose so completely from tradition as he 
did, but then Correggio is always an exception in the 
history of art, the exception that proves the rule, the 
only instance of a prophet unhonored save in his own 
country, the only giant who during his lifetime was 
passed over by such a visiting connoisseur as Bembo, 
and was apparently known—and then largely by 
fortunate accident of friendship with Veronica Gam- 
bara—to only one of the arch patrons of the Renais- 
sance, the great marchioness, the Marchesana Isa- 
bella d’Este. 

With Correggio and the protagonists of the Ro- 
man School, came the colossi, whose mural painting 
we should lose if we admitted as decorative only 
fifteenth-century art. In fact, just at this period 
came the culmination of the change in painting 
which ushered in the mural panel, vast in size and 
in subject. In place, for instance, of Ghirlandajo’s 


282 INFLUENCE OF FIFTEENTH 


wall in the Sala of the Palazzo Vecchio of Florence, 
to take a typical example, we have a Marriage of 
Cana by Paul Veronese; in place of Perugino’s vault- 
ing to the Hall of the Exchange in Perugia, full of 


scrolls and geometrical patterns and figurines, we 


have a cupola of Parma by Correggio, filled with 
clouds and angels. As in any very radical change 
in systems, potential in either case for delight, there 
was great gain and great loss on either side—great 
loss of delicate, exquisite richness, and architectonic 
completeness, great gain of simplicity and breadth 
and nobility. And, as in every such instance, we 
must try to adjust ourselves, to balance both sides 
of the ledger, and get profit from the loss, since we 
must have loss in our profit. Much of the older 
lesson could persist in its influence, much of the 
delicate ornament could be preserved, and could still 
enrich and engarland the great new compositions. 
And these same great new compositions were to be- 
come the most renowned examples in the entire his- 
tory of painting. The continuance of the fifteenth- 
century system of decoration would have involved 
the renunciation, the loss, of these world-famous 
works, these teachers and sources of inspiration. 
The partisans of guattrocento art would break up 
the wall into relatively small divisions, and spot 
the great panel with gold and pattern. Such an 
ordering is lovely and decorative, but the splendid 
breadth and volume of the sixteenth-century sys- 


AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES 283 


tem is even more valuable, and it is only upon 
wide stretches of wall that the great outpouring be- 
comes possible. Had it not been for the vast mu- 
ral panel, Raphael, Correggio, Veronese, Tintoretto 
would not have found space to open their mighty 
wings, and the world would never have known 
Michelangelo as painter. Had the quattrocento order- 
ing been retained, art would have been robbed of 
the Cana of the Louvre, the Crucifixion of Tin- 
toretto, the ceilings of Tiepolo, the great wall can- 
vases of Rubens and Vandyck, and so many others 
beside. Could we spare them? 

To be suspicious and uneasy regarding very large 
canvases is natural enough, because there are so 
many bad ones, and the reason for this badness is as 
patent—it is because to do good ones is very difficult. 
But this fact affords no reason for giving them up; 
rather, on the contrary, the very strongest reason in 
the world for admiring them and studying them 
above all other forms of decoration—studying them 
as the examples most perfectly suited to the wor- 
thiest celebration of the noblest themes of the past, 
the present, or, so far as we can yet know, of the fu- 
ture. In that future will be raised here in America 
capitols and court-houses and libraries, vast build- 
ings of all descriptions in which will be signalized 
the fastes and some of the #ristia, too, of the common- 
wealth. In the making of this celebration and com- 
memoration we shall need the lovely motives of the 


284 INFLUENCE OF FIFTEENTH 


fifteenth century, modernized into appropriateness, 
to bind together our subjects, but when these become 
events of national import, battles on sea and land, 
and apotheoses of inventions and discoveries, the 
victories in short of war and peace, we may not, we 
must not, crowd them into little panels, medallions, 
octagons, and lunettes; we must give them breath- 
ing space, the wide stretch of wall which Veronere 
and Raphael and Rubens loved. 

And just as Raphael and Veronese and Bubs 
and Tiepolo went on one after the other, adding each 
some new element—mind you, I do not say always 
improving, but always adding and changing—so in 
our case we shall modify and alter, loosening our sur- 
face here, tightening it there, finding new modes of 
handling, practising them, pushing them for a while 
to the very front as ultimate, then abandoning them 
for others, forging always new links in the chain of — 
the arts. | 


II 


It is easy to see why the traveller in Italy should 
sometimes conceive prejudice against mural paint- 
ing on a very large scale. The practice of using 
vast canvases was at first coincident with the great- 
est moment of art, but necessarily and by inexorable 
law that moment soon lapsed. Naturally the epoch 
of decadence lasted longer, and produced more; and 


AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES — 285 


just as naturally the visitor to Italy sees more of its 
productions and is unpleasantly affected. 

After the use came the abuse of such decoration, 
and it is against the abuse that one instinctively and 
properly rebels. Toward the end of the sixteenth 
century the painted outpouring of figures became 


hysterical, the gods and nymphs, heroes and sages, 


who already covered the walls and ceilings of the 
great sala, swarmed out through the windows and 
spread and climbed upon the facade. We mourn 
the fading of Giorgione’s fresco upon the Fondaco 
det Tedeschi because he was Giorgione. We like to 
feel that he and his comrade Titian were not yet 
far enough within the threshold of the sixteenth 
century to depart from the great traditions of archi- 
tectonic treatment. But when we hear that Tin- 
toretto painted a whole cavalry fight “for the price 
of his colors and to show his hand”’ upon the facade 


of a Venetian palace, our remembrance of Jacopo’s 


audacious disinvoltura of spirit in the face of any 
hard-and-fast ruling makes us shrug our shoulders. 
The practice of using huge canvases had been abused. 
When a big thing is weak it 1s more offensive than a 
little one. We instinctively look for an observation 
of proportion appropriate to the character of the 
work, and should probably not care to see even 
Botticelli’s “Venus,” for instance, as big as the 
Delphica; and this is why we are anxious and sus- 


picious regarding large canvases, for what happened 


286 INFLUENCE OF FIFTEENTH 


in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in 
Italy may happen here and now, though I shall 
not add a fortiori, for a young and growing school is 
safeguarded from some things by its very timidity. 
Furthermore our American school of painting, 
young as it is, is on the upward trend, and we must 
take some risks, trying at least to turn our blunders © 
into stepping-stones. The small panel, to be sure, is 
apt to be safer than the large one; a song is easier to 
write acceptably than a symphony, but the fact 
would not excuse discontinuing symphonies, and as 
for safety in mural painting, if that is what you 
are after, the logical end is plain kalsomine. If 
the great wall painting be a complete success, and 
it sometimes was in the hands of Michelangelo, 
Veronese, Tintoretto, Rubens, it is apt to be as 
highly organized and vital as any painting that has 
been produced, and perhaps most inclusive of all. 
After Veronese and Tintoretto the crest of the 
wave broke, and their followers took easily, too 
easily, what they liked from the wreckage which 
lay spread around. Even for the modern painter, 
humble though he should be before memory of 
the past, there is a certain temptation of the 
devil which comes with especial force to the decora- 
tor who looks down from the high places of his — 
scaffold upon great stretches of wall, and thinks 
that the world is his if he will only easily and quickly 
throw something fluent and attractive upon the said 


Ainjuad yaa xis AjIva 9Yy1 Jo JouULUT 9Y} UL pauUIqWiod "JUsUIvUIO pu dINsYy jo adwexy 


ee 


: 3821109 ulopMOgd ‘AIs][eH WV Joye 94} Ul UOTIVIOIICT  IWO’ ,, >wadda A OATH 


——_ 


: AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES — 287 


space. The theatre for his display is so brilliant 
in its possibilities—summary work seen at a distance 
may be so effective—and there is so much which he 
could borrow easily from his souvenirs, that it is 
very hard for the decorator to resist, to nerve him- 
self for hard work, and, above all, hard thinking. 
But that is what he must do unless he would prove 
a nuisance even, since slight work becomes irritating 
and finally grows offensive to the intelligent-minded, 
so that its existence works real injury to the future 
of mural painting and disposes us to reject it in toto 
in favor of simple pattern or colored marble. 

And this is the bane of decadent art, that ‘‘born 
too late in a world” of art methods made too easy, 
its practice leaves the onlooker indifferent at first, 
then irritates him, then disgusts him. 


* 


r, 


‘ 


r 
& 


‘TENDENCY 


= 
Z, 
fx) 
MN 
[ea 
4 
jal 
= 
ra 
< 
O 
pe 
Eo 
a 
©) 
A ae 


XITI 


MODERN TECHNIC AND PRESENT 
TENDENCY 


SEVERAL of the foregoing chapters have been de- 
voted to the derivation of our practice in mural 
painting; of course, any practice involves prefer- 
ence, but when personal preference becomes so 
burning a question that we have to plead for even 
toleration, we are pretty sure to find that technical 
execution, the manner of using the tools, is what 
we have to discuss. The most narrow-minded of 
artists is naturally the student, because he is im- 
mediately and embarrassingly preoccupied, not with 
methods, but with a@ method. By means of this 
method he hopes to attain his ideal. Now whatever 
may be said about “Feeling” and “Freedom” and 
their logical sequence of annihilation of methods, we 
still have some schools and some students left, and 
we have tried to show that the school ideal of the 
present is vigor of presentation. 

Upon a canvas or a wall all that an artist has to 
depend upon, for personal expression, 1s a flat, painted 


surface; to make that surface vital and entertain- 
291 


292 MODERN TECHNIC 


ing through the manner of application of the pigment 
seems to be the first preoccupation of the painter of 
to-day. In any discussion of this preoccupation it 
is interesting to touch briefly upon its development, 
its advances and retrogressions in the past, since the 
best plea for toleration is made in a showing of di- 
verse excellences. } 

The progression, throughout the centuries, toward 
freedom of handling in painting is not successively 
graduated. It is not like the progression of a piece 
of music in which the theme has been planned from 
the beginning, and is sketched, then stated, then de- 
veloped. Hints there are for development of brush 
practice, but they seem be the accidental results of 
temporary procedure. Such are the hints of broken 
color and vibration afforded in mosaic work, the 
foreshadowing of the pointilliste in the little gilded 
or bronzed or colored dots which filled the wall 
paintings of the Umbrians, the gilded rays from 
embossed bursts of glory, the glittering patterns 
impressed by the tool on haloes, or upon deliciously 
dainty raiment for angels, who were lucky enough 
to be robed by the splendor-loving Sienese. Dis- 
integration of surface and color change have 
often helped instead of hurting these mixtures of 
paint and gesso, till some of the tinselled, celestial 
dandies of Crivelli, for instance, have become really 
splendid in their scintillant surface. But this is 


partly accidental, and it is not brush-handling, for ’ 4 


AND PRESENT TENDENCY 293 


subtile and varied brush-handling could only begin 
to grow after a vehicle had been discovered elastic 
enough to permit dexterity to attain freedom. 

At first, the new oil medium only softened model- 
ling instead of emphasizing it. With the Van Eycks, 
with Antonello, with Giovanni Bellini in his Frari 
Madonna, the manner of the making is hidden in 
some of the most beautiful pictures ever painted; but 
soon men became quite willing that the brush strokes 
should be seen; and a little later to make them ob- 
vious, to make them count as strokes, was a de- 
sideratum. In the work of Titian, who was almost 
the earliest to loosen his surface, preoccupation with 
construction never came first, and he thought, not 
so much about how he placed, or which way he 
dragged his brush spot, as about what color it was, 
and what should be the color of the spot beside it. 
He wanted his canvas to tell at a reasonable distance, 
and it is probable that change of eyesight, as his years 
piled themselves up, had not a little to do with the 
way in which he smudged the pigment with his 
thumb or with a rag, did anything indeed, in supreme 
indifference to all except result. 

Neither Titian nor any other Venetian could have 
come to heavy color-loading abruptly. The depar- 
ture was too radical, the traditional indispensability 
of transparency was too compelling. They were 
every one of them workers in tempera, and they 
could not forget it all at once. They began their 


294 MODERN TECHNIC 


progression by putting more oil in their cups and 
widening the brush sweep. Correctness of sweep 
depended on the man; Veronese, who could draw 
and construct, accomplished it easily and often. 
Tintoretto achieved it with mastery, when he was 
willing to take the trouble, as in his “Miracle of 
St. Mark,” and did it in some of the worst of 
his Scuola di San Rocco canvases, as if he had been 
armed with a dirty broom, a bucket of oil, and a 
finished insouciance. Palma Vecchio came some- 
where near it in two or three pictures, but usually 
painted women who were like golden balloons of 
epidermis. Fluid breadth had, however, at last been 
accomplished in the best paintings of Veronese and 
Tintoretto, with pigment thinly but loosely and 
easily swept onto the canvas, and reinforced here and 
there, in the lights, with slightly loaded passages. 
Tintoretto left no one behind strong enough to take 
up the Italian succession, but the funeral in Venice 
was closely followed by the baptism in Siegen of 


a little Peter Paul, who was to open the pathway — 


to modern technic. Rubens, Vandyck, and their 


eroup in their larger canvases developed still fur- 


ther the fluent ease of Veronese, and in some of their 


works, notably in some of their heads, began to 


paint solidly dans la pate, with brushes which left a 
handsome grain behind them. With Frans Hals 
came a breadth which in its unerring assuredness has 


not been surpassed, and Rembrandt was, perhaps, — a 


es ee oe” ee ee 


ak = ee ane ei fear Waa) : - one 
Fat SR Ne ee ee ee ge ee, ee 


AND PRESENT TENDENCY 295 


the first artist who frankly entertained himself with 
pigment, just as pigment, that is to say, as a pasty 
substance, which could be thickened or thinned, 
spread heavily or not, in planes or lumps, parsimoni- 
ously or abundantly, with a hand which caressed, 
kneaded—did just what it chose, in fact. Some- 
times keeping his mask in deep, contrasted shadow, 
he loaded a helmet with light till it seemed built out 
as if with gesso. Sometimes his surface was full of 
crumb, friable-looking, again it was dissolved until 
it fairly ran with golden liquid, then, presto! —he re- 
turned to a porcelain-like smoothness, recalling his 
earliest work, and on the morrow leaped forward 
again to the breadth of his Syndics. Some writer 
on music has said that here or there in Bach may 
be found the suggestion for anything in music; and 
one might say that almost any surface handling may 
be found, in embryo or completed development, 
between the Zuyder Zee and the Maas, and in the 
years that made up the seventeenth century. 
Here was an overpowering inheritance for the 
lover of brush-handling, and it was varied and con- 
tinued elsewhere and later. In Spain Velasquez 
came, noble, sometimes impeccable, the monarch of 
all brush workers, so sincere, so simple, and so logical, 
that he beat the most brilliant on their own ground. 
With Hals, for instance, one notices the handling 
first of all; with Velasquez one only feels it in the 
perfection of the result, a result aided by the purity 


296 MODERN TECHNIC 


which he maintains in his grays; whereas Hals varies 
in his color, passing from marvellous force and clarity 


in some of his Haarlem corporation pictures to inky 


blackness in some of his later work. In Spain, too, 
Goya followed later, audacious, disconcerting, fasci- 
nating. In the French eighteenth century, surface 
ran a whole gamut; sometimes the languor and vapors 
of the boudoir entered into the artist’s brush work, 
which again turned to hard commonplaceness in por- 
traits that, nevertheless, were highly characterized. 
Boucher, at times charming, was often cheap; but 
Watteau, Lancret, Pater, whether melancholy or friv- 
olous, kept a jewelled suggestion in their surface. 
Latour’s little masques in the museum of St. Quen- 
tin astound us to-day by their vitality, both of 
execution and character, and Chardin brought to his 
brush-handling and color a quality at once so beauti- 
ful and so sterling that it must satisfy the most ex- 
acting. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Alps, a 
solitary figure, Tiepolo, performed with the brush 
point, whether in oil or fresco, feats of disinvoltura, 
which for downright skilfulness have, perhaps, been 
unequalled in the history of art. Then came the 
deluge, and except where the English school, inher- 
itor of Rubens through Vandyck, of Titian through 


Reynolds, stood safe and strong in its insularity, 


tradition was swept away by the French Revolu- 
tion. | 2S 
Surface turned in the hands of David into some- 


Pe ee ee ee ee 


me! oe 


; 1 
en eet ee ee Se en a ee, ae ns ae aM) 


(Ama0d 0} pajoAap salies dy} UT) 


sso13uo0d jo Arviqry oy Ul ayounyT = ,,*lopuevurAy jo Aog oY ],,, :YaMIVAA AAAIIO AUNAHY 


UOLIUDD & SIQ4AND MQ BY SrAhGor ‘yfvasojoyg V Ul0def 


» 


AND PRESENT TENDENCY 297 


thing as hard as his own pitiless political creed, 
though there were occasional rare returns to the 
past, as in the wonderful portrait of a young man in 
the Salle des Quatre Cheminées of the Louvre by 
Prudhon. But even he, great artist though he was, 
in most of his oil-paintings shared with all the rest 
an absolutely uninteresting handling which had be- 
come common property. This benumbed condition 
of one of the technical qualities of painting lasted for 
a while. Then the wings of the Romanticists began 
to flutter uneasily, and presently the landscapists 
found their grove of the Muses in the forest of 
Fontainebleau, their Pierian spring in Barbizon. 
With a check of but fifty years at most, brush work 
had developed in one way or another, not always 
steadily advancing, but changing, moving, keeping 
alive, from Titian to Millet. It is all a great, wonder- 
ful picture-book in which may be found the excuse if 
not the entire justification of those who now some- 
times preoccupy themselves too entirely with sur- 
face, and surely it is open also for the confusion of 
those Sir Charles Coldstreams of post-impressionism 
who declare that, as with the crater of Vesuvius, 
“there is nothing in it.” That there is everything 
in it one may not aver, or rather we may not say 
that everything has already come out of it—the up- 
heavals of the mountain will continue as long as 
there is planetary heat, and always there will be 
something new, at least in combination. To just 


298 MODERN TECHNIC 


what forms of combination the future will turn its 
kaleidoscope the artist can no more predict than can 
any other man. Assuredly the few last years have 
been whirling about the kaleidoscopic tube in what 
has seemed at times an almost frenzied pursuit of — 
novelty. Nevertheless, a study of our American 
tendencies in the present, while it may discover and 
set down in the chart dangerous reefs, yields also 
abundant material for both pride and hope. 

Mr. Kenyon Cox, in his admirable book, has 
shown with his usual lucidity that the methods of the 
Venetian painters and Correggio in the treatment of — 
color have not been surpassed since they laid down 
their brushes—perhaps never will be surpassed. In- 
deed, their canvases are so beautiful that we need 
not look for anything better, but, on the other hand, 
we shall not be unreasonable if we occasionally ask 
for something different. No one could wish for more 
golden color upon flesh, which is yet exactly like 
flesh and not like a yellow glaze over paint, than 
one sees upon the torso and limbs of Correggio’s 
“‘Antiope” in the Louvre, or the marvellously rich 
yet delicate passages in Titian’s “Flora” of the 
Uffizi in Florence, or in his “Madonna with Saint 
Jerome” in the same gallery. What canvas surface 
could blaze more splendidly than Tintoretto’s ‘Saint 
Agnes” in the Orto Church of Venice. If you go to 
it at the right hour of the day it seems fairly in- 
candescent.. Again, as one stands under Veronese’s 


ee ae 


Wee Ses 


AND PRESENT TENDENCY 299 


“Triumph of Venice,” the huge oval canvas in the 
Ducal Palace, one never ceases to marvel as to how 
its maker could have found so much glow and so 
much freshness, so much gold yet so much silver. 
Tiepolo in his way is as astonishing. Perhaps no 
other methods can produce such lasting glow and 
transparency as the thin painting with glazes and oc- 
casional loaded passages practised by the Venetians. 

But, on the other hand, while cordially agreeing 
for the most part with Mr. Cox, I am inclined to 
go even further than he does: not to stop with the 
Venetians, but to pass on and claim distinct qualities 
for opaque and loaded color also. Indeed, we can- 
not stop with the Venetians and their transparent 
methods in technic any more than we can stop at 
fifteenth-century decoration with Pinturicchio and 
the quattrocentisti. Mr. Cox admits this and re- 
cords the changes as readily as does any one, his 
claim being simply that change in art does not 
necessarily mean advance. Such a claim is incon- 
trovertible, if by advance we infer a higher plane 
along the whole horizon. But in chronicling de- 
velopment, opaque and loaded pigment, even if not 
as ideally suited to decoration as transparent color, 
must be reckoned with, because they have become 
the desiderata and therefore the working material 
of the artist of to-day. In a dome, to be sure, or 
any mural painting placed very far from the eye, 
loaded pigment can no longer be made out as 


300 MODERN TECHNIC 


an attractive element of surface treatment, but 
when seen near at hand it is sometimes effective. 
As far as the masters of transparent color are con- 
cerned, I am on my knees to Veronese and Pinturic- 
chio; they have my worshipping admiration; in its 
way nothing can be better than either of them; but 
there are other ways; man’s heart keeps on beating 
or he dies, and he must change as he goes, Perhaps 
the new ways will never again be as good as the old 
ones, but there is always room for hope. Tiepolo 
had already in the eighteenth century advanced in 
some respects beyond his inspiration, Veronese; and 
if the forms and spirit of art change from generation 
to generation the technic which expresses them is 
sure to undergo modification, some of it hampering, 
some of it even hurtful, but some of it surely helpful. 
There are perhaps aspects of nature which can be 
better expressed in opaque and loaded color than in 
the relatively slight washes and transparent glazes 
of the Venetians. 

Mr. Cox says very truly that much of our loaded 
pigment is mud; so it is, but the best of it is not. 
As I look at the work of some of our powerful 
painters and stand before their pounding — seas 
battering great rocks, I cannot believe that the sense 
of weight and volume, the feeling communicated 
that this water is rubbing away the coasts and carv- 
ing the earth into new shapes, could be given by 
thin painting with glazes. When I look at the 


AND PRESENT TENDENCY 301 


extremely distinguished cool blue sea in another 
artist’s picture at the Metropolitan, I feel that his 
technic in turn is exactly suited to what he wishes 
to create. Before a canvas in a corner of the Van- 
derbilt Gallery of one of our academy exhibitions, a 
year or two ago, I said to myself: “Is it necessary to 
use so much pigment that it catches the light un- 
pleasantly?” Then I stood back at the proper 
distance, and replied to myself: “Yes, the artist is 
quite right; by his method he has given actual 
existence in paint to a huge mass of mountain. We 
feel in looking at it that it has been heaved up 
mightily by the underforces of the earth, and the 
vigorous loading of the color helps greatly, at least 
as it seems to me, in the impression.” 

So it is with the intense, vital work of many of 
our artists, the vigor of the handling helps the land- 
scape to exist. Look at some of the powerfully 
painted pictures in the Metropolitan. Great masses 
of opaque color have been used, truly; but consider 
them carefully, and you will see how these splashes 
of pigment have been caressed afterwards, and by 
subtility and glazing have been worked into deli- 
cate harmonies; here in these canvases are Venetian 
methods of glaze and scumble and light loading 
laid directly on top of the heavy modern painting. 
Whether such methods will last chemically is quite 
another matter. Of course, the less pigment you 
use the more you diminish certain unpleasant 


302 MODERN TECHNIC 


chances, but I have never heard anything conclusive 
on this subject, and hope and believe that the dan- 
gers have been greatly exaggerated. | 

At every period, even the most eclectic—and the 
present is assuredly that—you may find, if you look 
for it, a prevailing tendency in technic. Ours 
stands out and does not have to be sought; it is the 
tendency to strive for vigor of presentation. In 
sculpture Rodin has been an exemplar; in painting 
we are proud of an American, Sargent, who as painter 
overtops in his sheer force even most of the painters 
of the past. With him, and with a hundred others, 
vigor of handling has so entered into our practice, 
and so fascinated our regard, that it will, I believe, 
remain a dominant quality in the art of to-day. It 
is an enormously difficult quality to cultivate to its — 
highest point, because that highest point includes 
conciliation of vigor with depth and even with deli- 
cacy, since perforce nothing is complete without its 
complement. To even approach it closely is enor- 
mously difficult, for the added volume of pigment 
renders the technical task still harder than before, 
the riddle of the Sphinx is yet more troublesome to 
answer. | 

Yet I cannot believe that in our time we could re- 
turn in our creative wish to the portraits, for in- 
stance, of Van Eyck or Holbein, or even of Mor, 
after the portraits to which we are now accustomed, 


with their volume of pigment and broad handling. _ 


AND PRESENT TENDENCY 303 


We could not do them, you say, if we would. No, 
we could not, because we could not wish hard enough 
for that kind of excellence to love and labor it into 
existence. The expression of our aspiration sounds 
to other chords, our labor is accomplished more 
with our nerves. The Van Eycks and Holbeins, in 
their profound sincerity, their quiet and noble 
stateliness, their unsurpassability, may have been 
finer than anything we can do to-day, but to com- 
pare them with modern work is neither here nor 
there. The gentleman in shining armor and brocade 
may have been better to look at than the man who 
sits to us, but our business is with the latter; our 
way is our way, and in its immediacy it 1s in the main 
a sum total of derivations from what surrounds us. 


XIV 
IN CONCLUSION 


oa 


XIV 


IN CONCLUSION 


DexTEROUs, subtile, powerful, and beautiful han- 
dling of surface has been achieved by modern Ameri- 
can painters. Again as in the seventeenth century 
there are seen surfaces crumby or running, loaded 
everywhere or loaded only in places, spotted and 
striped or united and smooth. One would say that 
everything which drag or scumble or glaze could do 
is within the grasp of our artists; great variety and 
great distinction of color and of tone have been 
achieved: our painters have learned to speak their 
language; what are they going to say with it? 
Rembrandt said sublime things. Titian and Rubens 
spoke nobly, Giorgione passionately. But above 
all, Rembrandt said, Holland! Rubens, Flanders! 
Giorgione, Italy! Will our painters say, America? 
Assuredly yes, in time. Already our French accent 
has lessened to the proportions of a tonic to our 
enunciation—already our landscape-painters are na- 
tional, and of a certainty our portrait-painters and 
sculptors and our mural painters are becoming so. 

In entering any of our best exhibitions to-day the 

397 


308 IN CONCLUSION 


visitor is struck at once by the quality of tone of the 
whole as compared with what he would have found - 
there only a few years ago. Our sculptors, men and 
women alike, are making an extraordinary showing. 
As to mural painting, which has been the subject of 
this book, no field’is wider, more embracing, more 
capable of offering a career to the younger genera- 
tion of artists, if they will enter upon it with an 
earnest spirit, and a willingness to study commen- 
surate with its exactions. I cannot too strongly ex- 
press my belief in the potentiality of the future if we 
will only think hard enough, and work hard enough, 
and believe hard enough. All plans can be bettered, 
all appropriations be. more generously made, and 
more wisely expended, all work can be better done, if 
we will only study the matter in hand closely enough, 
study it unitedly, and look back intelligently at the 
past with the future in our minds. Prodigious — 
lessons lie spread out behind us, and we have only to 
look over our shoulder to perceive them, without 
once needing to turn our footsteps backward. On 
the contrary, we may push forward, architects, 
sculptors, and painters all together, putting Ameri- 
can dexterity and adaptability at the service of the © 
lesson learned. e 

Men talked and acted two cate iia years ‘ago 
much as we are doing to-day, putting aside problems 
of art in favor of budget and plan: of campaign: ‘‘the 
unnecessary” in favor of the “necessary,” ‘‘the 


(dH “A—'suoneiosep Joyo Au Jo Aueul Ur Sv [JOM se Sso1duoD Jo AIVIGI'T oY} UI UOTZeIOSap AW UT JURYsISse AUT SEM 1I9T]T AA “1JA) 


Oly) ‘UMO1S3UNO L ‘OSNOF{-}INOZD Ayunos suluoyreyy out JO WOOI-]INOS & Ul [OUP :LLATTIIM aa Vi 


Or6r ‘27977244 “YN V7 &9 2y8t4kGo7 


% 


IN CONCLUSION 309 


superfluous” in favor of the ‘‘vital’’; and two thou- 
sand years later the unnecessary and superfluous is 
what remains vital and cogent, a concrete entity and 
a compelling influence. Now, when a man is a 
power in the land one of his rewards is the ability to 
acquire some surpassing ‘‘old master.” When a 
royal visitor comes to us his first journey is to the 
treasures of the art museum. Do not let us mistake; 
some of the stones set up by architects to-day, some 
of the messages of the sculptor and painter, will be 
effective still when some of the ideas now current in 
every brain and influencing hourly action are super- 
seded and have faded from men’s minds. Good art 
is tremendous in its endurance. How essential is it, 
then, that we pay tribute of earnest, single-hearted 
thoughtfulness in watching and nursing the creative 
impulse, lest in place of what should endure we pile 
up rubbish that is hard even to sweep away. 

_ And in the payment of such tribute we shall but 
‘conform to the wisdom of the ages, for after the pa- 
triot there was no one whom the older civilizations 
could so lastingly bless as the artist. The patriot 
gave the country its existence and preserved it, de- 
veloped its resources as farmer and merchant, and 
defended it as soldier. The artist set up the land- 
marks by which the city was known; he gave it the 
distinctive shape which was dear to each townsman; 
he made the familiar sky-line which told the return- 
ing traveller that he was nearing home; he gave their 


310— IN CONCLUSION 


character to the well-known streets, and set town hall, 
church, and court-house in their places. The money 
of the merchant, the labor of the farmer and artisan, 
were the solid base upon which all these arose; and 
this treasure which they gave remains to them still, 
and pedestals their memory as enduringly as their 
monuments. But the artist was the creator; he 
stamped the city materially as truly as ever coiner 
struck the impression of the die into the soft gold 
and left there the lily of the florin, or the winged lion 
of the sequin. And the home-sick wanderer, when far 
away, carried with him in his mind the creation of the 
artist. 

And it is so to-day. The traveller is thinking of 
home, of his native city, but what represents it to 
him in memory is Christopher Wren’s great dome of 
Saint Paul’s—a blue-gray bubble upon a horizon of 
sepia; or it is Soufflot’s Panthéon, topping its wave- 
crest sky-line of houses; or the twin towers of Notre 
Dame, and the long vapor-canopied stretch of river 
curving westward to where the sunset shines through 
that giant loop of masonry, the Arch of the Star. 
What is the city of Cologne to any of us but the 
huge church which, as the Rhine steamer recedes | 
with us, grows and grows and dwarfs its surround- 
ings till it seems bigger than the town? Strasburg 
is a spire pointing upward from the flat green plain 
of Alsace; Pisa is that one solemn group of buildings, 
the mausoleum of her dead liberty. And thus to 


IN CONCLUSION | 311 


each of us his native city means some familiar shape, 
and each, when distant from it, like Dante exiled 
from Florence, longs for ‘‘i] mio bel San Giovanni.” 

Every civilization of the past has turned to the 
fine arts to make a nobler setting for its daily life. 
Each has looked backward and learned of the fore- 
runners; and we must do even as they. We may do 
as France has done: go and sit at the feet of the 
masters and learn to achieve that wider art which 
embellishes not only our individual houses but our 
city. For France has sat at the feet of Italy. She 
has sent her architects, painters, sculptors to Rome. 
Of her great mural painters, Paul Baudry went 
straight to Michelangelo, Raphael, and Correggio; 
Puvis de Chavannes to Giotto, Luini, and the Lom- 
bards. Adding their native genius to the study of 
great examples, her architects have laid out Paris so 
cunningly, and created so many beautiful temples, 
courts of law, fountains, and squares, that the eye 
travels almost insensibly from vista end to vista 
end, and rests successively upon these different ar- 
chitectural creations as upon so many points of pa- 
triotic progress along the path of civilization, until, 
last of all, it reaches the town hall, where, upon its 
facades, the dead worthies of France stand sculp- 
tured in scores—patriots, artists, writers, workers of 
all kinds; the choir invisible made visible in stone— 
at once 2 commemoration, a decoration, and an eter- 
nal stimulus. 


312 


As it is in Piss so, let us ‘ek shall one | ay De 
in America when we shall have: ‘puee our best | 


at she capitol. 


a 
~ 
. 
x 
Xi : 
~ 
be 
A 
* oo 1 
x 
: 
Nes 
s 
* 
+ 
; 
é fio rey 
H " ais ‘ 
: ey | nee ‘-z 
use Es iy y, 
‘5 , } 
A 


